arabaliozian Posted October 11, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 11, 2008 Thursday, October 9, 2008 *********************************************** GENIUS KHANS ****************************** There are some Armenians so dumb that not only do they believe in their own assessment of themselves that they are offended when no one else does. * SUSPICION *********************** Whenever a reader insults me anonymously, I always assume him to be either a bishop, the son of a bishop, or someone equally disreputable. * DECLINE AND FALL ***************************** One way to explain the decline and fall of Armenian literature is by saying that first-rate writers and fourth-rate readers are mutually exclusive concepts. * THE BUSH DOCTRINE ******************************* It has been pointed out to me on several occasions that it is wrong being rude to my critics. Rude to my critics? Never! As far as I can remember, I have at no time been rude to them. Rude to kibitzers the purpose of whose oneupmanship is to take better aim when they piss on me – that's different. I don't call that being rude. I call it preemptive strike. * PHILISTINES ************************** There is a familiar type of odar philistine who connects Parisians to pissoirs, Italians to pizza, and Armenians to pilaf and shish-kebab. To be fair, in this connection I should make mention of the efforts of our Turcocentric pundits who have been doing their utmost to change that false impression. * HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY *********************************** Zsa Zsa Gabor: “My dad told me, 'Anything worth having is worth waiting for,' so I waited until I was fifteen.” At which point she fell for Atatürk. That's what I call a brilliant debut. # Saturday, October 11, 2008 *********************************************** CONFESSIONS ********************************** Lord Byron: “Who would write who had anything better to do?” * There are days when flipping hamburgers sounds like a more useful occupation to me. What could be more satisfying than feeding the hungry? It may not be as good as the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, granted. But it comes damn close to it. My only consolation: any writer who is unanimously rejected by partisan as well as non-partisan editors and reviled by garbage-mouth readers can't be all bad. * BEAN-COUNTERS *************************** I can understand laymen not reading the small print and being taken in by predatory lenders. What about chief executive officers and their small armies of advisers, assistants, accountants, and lawyers? What were they up to beside counting beans and pulling their dicks? If they too were taken in by cunning operators, how to explain the fact that they came out on top? The stench of conspiracy is so powerful that it would make a Bolshevik out of Senator McCarthy if he were alive. * THE REALITY PRINCIPLE ******************************************* Some people are so outrageously wrong that they don’t have to be corrected. Sooner or later life, facts, the reality principle will speak to them much louder than any logical argument or appeal to common sense and decency. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted October 15, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 15, 2008 Sunday, October 12, 2008 *********************************************** ON WRITING ******************************** Kingsley Amis: “If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there is little point in writing.” * If I fail to answer some questions or arguments it may be because I am too busy answering my perennial adversary – my former self. * There is a type of philistine for whom the word culture is almost synonymous with cuisine. * If shish-kebab and pilaf Armenians were to read a single Armenian book every year, Armenian literature would enjoy another renaissance. * I am accused of hanging out the nation's dirty linen by the dirty linen. * Cicero defines freedom as “participation in power.” If we are free, ours is the freedom of ants, birds, and herbivores – free to be stepped on, shot at, and devoured. * In one of his essays Sartre says that never had French intellectuals been so free as they were under the German occupation during World War II. Something similar could be said of Armenian intellectuals at the turn of the last century in Istanbul under the sultans. A 21st -century Baronian and Odian are unthinkable because they would be immediately and unanimously silenced by editors who are no better than hirelings of our bosses and benefactors. # Monday, October 13, 2008 *********************************************** VARIETIES OF PATRIOTIC EXPERIENCE ****************************************************** If Mother Teresa lost her faith, can any believer be safe in his own? And if I, a thoroughly brainwashed hater of all Turks, can realize that they are human beings like the rest of us, can any Armenian be safe in his hatred of Turks, and by extension, hatred of fellow Armenians who dare to disagree with him? * Ignorance of history allows a fool to think of himself as wise, a fanatic to be a moderate, and an executioner to be on the side of the angels. * When I speak of free speech, I speak in defense of all writers who at one time or another were permanently silenced by fascist regimes in the name of patriotism. I speak with the strength of many. * If you join a club of like-minded idiots and you assess yourself as wise, have at least the common sense and decency not to assess yourself as infallible. * Because I refuse to believe to be Armenian means to hate Turks in theory and to hate Armenians in practice, am I then an enemy of the people whose tongue should be cut off? * Diasporan patriotism: they pretend to love the country in order to hate fellow countrymen with a clear conscience. * Patriotism: which comes first, love of country or hatred of the enemy? * Solidarity in hatred, divisiveness in love: some may call that patriotism, I call it insanity. * Those who preach patriotism and violate the human rights of their fellow countrymen are liars, cowards, and partisans of subservience. * Love of country: mountains, rivers, and valleys are easy to love – they don't reason, neither do they judge. Love of fellow countrymen: a far more demanding enterprise. # Tuesday, October 14, 2008 *********************************************** TEN YEARS LATER ****************************************************** When a reader reacts with insults and profanities it may be because he has run out of arguments, or rather he never had any to begin with. * To meet two old detractors after ten years and to realize they haven't advanced an inch and they are the same horse's arses is a sensation akin to revenge without the guilt. * If a man's income is forty times your own, it doesn't necessarily follow that he is forty times smarter, though he may think so. * Sarah Palin claiming to be an expert in foreign affairs because she can see Russia from her porch has a counterpart among Armenians who think they are patriotic because they know “Yes im anoush Hayastani” by heart. * Let us not confuse hatred of Turks with love of the Homeland, or being slaves of former slaves with freedom. * St. John: “The one who says that he loves God and does not love his brother is a liar.” So is the Armenian who loves his Homeland but hates his fellow Armenian. * The contempt of the nouveau riche for the intellectual who can't make ends meet, the loathing of the bourgeois for the white trash, and the scorn of the aristocracy for the bourgeois – Turgenev's of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy's of Shakespeare, Nabokov's of Freud and Sartre.... * St. Paul: “If any man among you seems to be wise in this world, let him become a fool that he may be wise.” # Wednesday, October 15, 2008 *********************************************** VIPERS ***************** Some share their thoughts, others their venom. But in order to share their venom, they must store it somewhere, that is to say, they must make themselves venomous. Unlike vipers that are not harmed by their own venom, however,human venom is stored in the heart and circulates throughout the entire organism. It follows, those who share their venom become its most generous recipients. Hence Gandhi's dictum, “Hatred injures us more than those we hate.” * PROBLEMS *********************** Life is an endless succession of problems. Some problems can be solved, others, like death, taxes, and the voice of one's conscience, cannot. * QUESTIONS ******************* Can anyone name a single Armenian who has freely relinquished even a tiny fraction of his income, prestige, or power for the sake of solidarity -- that is to say, that which makes of us a nation as opposed to a collection of tribes? * Sometimes I am asked: “Why are you so consistently negative?” My reply: Negative is in the eye of the beholder. To be against lies is positive; but not to the liar, of course. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted October 18, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 18, 2008 Thursday, October 16, 2008 *********************************************** BELLS RINGING ******************************* Albert Camus in the latest volume of his NOTEBOOKS: “Our literary society whose principle is second-rate spite, where offense takes the place of critical method.” After reading Dostoevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: “I seriously consider the possibility of giving up.” As a diarist Camus is disappointing. Unlike Gide and Jules Renard he makes no effort to be accessible. One entry simply reads: “The truth. The truth!” And another: “Thoughts of death.” He quotes a French historian saying: “The Russians rotted before they were ripe.” And we were ripe 1500 years ago. “Buddhism is atheism that became religion.” I am reminded of Gandhi's observation that even atheists are believers because they believe the non-existence of God to be the Truth, and God is Truth. * NOTES & COMMENTS ******************************************* We converted to Christianity as readily and passively as we converted to atheism under the Soviets. * Historians study the past in the same way that psychologists study the unconscious. History as mankind's unconscious drives made visible. We are prisoners of our past as surely as a man is a prisoner of his unconscious drives. * As in all fascist regimes, we have replaced intellectuals with propagandists. Hence the popularity of our Turcocentric ghazetajis. * After we have seen and experienced what hatred does to people, we live as though hatred were the only answer. * When they can't stand the heat, they drive you out of the kitchen. # Friday, October 17, 2008 *********************************************** FEAR ******************************* To the faceless cowards who insult me anonymously and from a safe distance I say: One does not have to be a prophet to predict that your big mouth will be your undoing. And if you say, What about your big mouth? I will inform you that my undoing, if it comes, will have two sources, (one) being honest among phonies, and (two) writing for Armenians, which, in case you didn't know, happens to be a capital offense in our environment. You want proof? Read a text on the history of Armenian literature or the biography of any Armenian writer chosen at random. And if you are too lazy to do that, consider the fact that our history has been shaped by ruthless foreign tyrants and their collaborators among us. Allow me to remind you that two of the most notorious executioners of writers – Talaat and Stalin – earned their reputation with the full support and assistance of our traitors. * Nothing comes easier to an Armenian than to assert a superior brand of patriotism. And it goes without saying that he who has a high opinion of himself, will also have a correspondingly low opinion of his fellow men, so low in fact that he will assume none of them to be smart enough to see through him. A truly superior man does not feel the need to assert superiority. Only the inferior (“storin” or “varnots” in Armenian) do that to cover up their inferiority. * In an environment where propagandists are rated above intellectuals, not only the intellectuals but also the people will be at the mercy of executioners. For more on this subject, read a text on our history, provided of course it is not written by a hireling. * What are liars afraid of? The truth, of course, which they try to bury with their lies. But truth, which has a life all its own, refuses to remain buried forever. Its resurrection, which may happen in three or thirty three days or years, is inevitable. It is the awareness of this inevitability that liars fear. # Saturday, October 18, 2008 *********************************************** ON BIAS ******************************* If you classify your fellow men as Black and White, or Muslim and Christian, or Turk and Armenian, you introduce bias. Think of them as human beings and you will be surprised what happens next. What I am saying has nothing to do with Christian or any other kind of morality. Turning the other is an alien concept to me. So is loving my enemy or forgiving those who trespass against me. True, I was brought up as a Christian but my ethics remain pagan. If someone slaps me, my first instinct is to want to kill him. I think of both Turks and Armenians as human beings because that's what they are, and I have discovered that some Armenians are more Turk than Armenian, and some Turks are more civilized than some Armenians. * In a democratic environment a disagreement is just a disagreement. In a fascist environment a disagreement can be a capital offense or provoke verbal abuse. * In a civilized environment, if you speak honestly, even those who disagree with you will respect you. * I believe in the Turkish version of our past as much as I believe in our own. I question the honesty of Turkish politicians as much as I question the honesty of all politicians, including our own. Nothing can be more naïve and foolish than to say our enemies are pathological liars but we speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted October 22, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 22, 2008 Sunday, October 19, 2008 *********************************************** A WOMAN AFTER MY OWN HEART **************************************************** In the introduction to her biography of the celebrated Italian novelist, Elsa Morante, Lily Tuck writes: “A truth teller, she tended to say hurtful things...She detested any sort of artifice, posturing, falsehood, she detested the misuse of power.” * THEY NEVER LEARN ************************************** Some Armenians are so hedamenats and aboosh that they think one way of defending the national badiv is by insulting Turks, and they stubbornly refuse to see that not only Turks outnumber us, but when it comes to delivering profanities and insults, they are pros and we don't even qualify as rank amateurs beside them. To Armenians who are addicts of profanities and insults, I suggest they stick to insulting their fellow Armenians, because then they have a better chance to come out on top. * MART BIDI CH'ELLANK *************************************** Whenever someone would recount a story about a fellow Armenian who had behaved badly, someone would say, “mart bidi ch'ellank!” meaning (freely translated) “once a jackass, always a jackass," or “we are a hopeless bunch!” I must have heard that line a thousand times, but never by those engaged in fund raising. These gentlemen know that if they flatter the dupes they plan to milk, they will be rewarded with more generous contributions. Hence the popular propaganda lines first nation this, first nation that, which may also be interpreted as first nation to be brainwashed and first nation to be taken in by foreign propaganda. As for the propaganda line that asserts we are just about the smartest people on earth, that was obviously designed to cover up the fact that we may well be be just about the dumbest. # Monday, October 20, 2008 *********************************************** ON SOLUTIONS ********************************* Never ask for solutions to our problems because all solutions begin with honesty, and since no one has yet discovered a verbal formula that can convert a crook to an honest man, all talk of solutions is a waste of time. * DEDICATION ******************************* The dedication to my next book will read: “For my critics and detractors – my most faithful muses.” * HEADLINES ************************* A headline in our paper reads: “Hour of death should be 'chosen by God' Pope says,” the implication being, the Pope can read God's mind like an open book. * Another headline: “Anglicans owe Darwin apology, bishop says.” But how does one go about apologizing to a skeleton? * GREED ************************ About the present financial crisis, I wonder how many CEOs said or thought “If things go wrong and the whole structure collapses, the government is bound to step in and fix it. We are too big to fail.” * A CEO at a hearing: “I take full responsibility.” He also took home $240,000,000 we are told. * ON REASON ****************************** You can reason only with the reasonable. With the unreasonable you can only go down on your knees and beseech the assistance of the Holy Spirit, if, that is, you believe in that mumbo jumbo. * ON LOVE ******************** Our religion teaches us to love our enemies. It says nothing about loving our fellow Armenians. Have I said that before? No matter. Some things are worth repeating. * WORDS OF WISDOM ********************************** Albert Einstein: “It's not that I am so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.” # Tuesday, October 21, 2008 *********************************************** EASIER SAID THAN DONE ***************************************** Speaking of Obama's favorite word: change means introducing new legislation, and “new laws,” according to an old German saying, “are followed by new tricks.” * WHAT'S DONE IS DONE ********************************** The very same readers who accuse me of living in the past whenever I quote an Armenian writer, never get tired of speaking or reading about the massacres in the Ottoman Empire. * CANNIBALS ************************** When they bite me and I refuse to bite back, they resent it as if to say, “What's the matter, am I not good enough to be eaten?” * ONE-UPMANSHIP ***************************** The ease with which they assume to know better even when the subject under discussion is a new one to them. * CONFESSION **************************** Speaking of dupes: in my youth when I heard a speechifier say something, I believed he meant it. And then I met some of them... * PROGRESS *********************** Some of my readers are getting better at dishing out insults. With a little more effort, practice, and discipline they may be as good as Turks. * AN OLD TRICK *************************** When the men at the top are corrupt, they emphasize the importance of patriotism, after which they stigmatize dissidents as unpatriotic. * MEMO ********************** To those who recycle chauvinist crapola, I say, Leave it to the professionals of which we have more than our share. I assure you, they don't need your two cents' worth. * SOPHISTS ************************** Those who want to get away with lies, rape, and murder, will tell you, these things existed since the beginning of time and no nation on earth is without them, in the same way that today they say corruption is universal and we might as well grin and bear it. # Wednesday, October 22, 2008 *********************************************** QUESTIONS ***************************************** If they sling mud anonymously, is it because deep down somewhere they are ashamed of what they do? * If our Turcocentric ghazetajis keep writing about Turks, is it because they have nothing good to say about their fellow Armenians? * If we are proud of our multi-millionaires, shouldn't we be humble of our slum-dwellers? * Is it humanly possible to ignore or forget the truth after hearing it? * I may react to an honest disagreement but not to an insult. How does one react to an insult without going down into the gutter where the other has the advantage? * ASSERTIONS ************************* No one can be as dangerous as a fool who is manipulated by another fool. * If you say to a bunch of crooks, “Gentlemen, let's be honest!” don't expect a mass conversion. * One cannot speak of vision where "the blind leads the blind." * There is a big difference between “he thinks,” and “he thinks he thinks.” To think, to really think, means to go beyond the boundaries of the already thought. * Who benefits when we cover up that which is negative? Surely not the victims. It follows, to cover up is to support and legitimize the victimizers among us. * Some of the dumbest people I know are Armenians who think they are smarter than Turks. * Communism has been defined as capitalism of the state, and capitalism as free enterprise for the poor. * Cowardice in the Ottoman Empire among Turks – it's understandable. But cowardice in America among fellow Armenians – it's not. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted October 25, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 25, 2008 Thursday, October 23, 2008 *********************************************** ON GOD ***************************************** I don't believe in the God of priests, mullahs, and holy scriptures, but I also believe you may let go of God ( whoever he may or may not be) but God will never let you go. * ON STYLE *********************** Hit and run. Make your point and move to the next. If you make sense they will get the message. If you don't make sense, at least you haven't wasted their time and yours. * ON CRITICS ************************* To how many of my critics I could say, Anyone who thinks as you do, does not deserve Naregatsi, Raffi, Baronian, Odian, Zarian, and Massikian. These gentlemen dedicated their lives in an effort to expand your horizons and you have deliberately chosen to live as though they never wrote a single line. * ON RECYCLING ENEMY PROPAGANDA ****************************************************** The ignorance of some Armenians is such that some of them go as far as recycling enemy propaganda in the name of patriotism. As when they say, “Our literature and culture flourished during the Soviet era,” which amounts to saying Russian literature flourished under Stalin, and German culture reached its apex under Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler. * QUESTION ************************ Why anyone in his right mind would read me if he can read Shakespeare and Tolstoy? -- unless it is for the pleasure of verbally abusing a fellow Armenian simply because he refuses to flatter his colossal ego. * ON SUPERPATRIOTS ********************************** A good Armenian superpatriot hates not only all Turks but also the whole world including and above all fellow Armenians who don't share his limitations and prejudices. # Friday, October 24, 2008 *********************************************** THE CREAM OF THE CRAP ***************************************** With the right camera angle and lighting, fragments in the life of the most pious and respectable married couple in the world could be made into a pornographic movie. That's what my critics do with my ideas. * Ignored, misunderstood, insulted, rejected, silenced, starved, exiled, shot – at long last Armenian writers are now for all practical purposes extinct. Where Talaat and Stalin failed, our bosses, bishops, benefactors and their assorted hirelings succeeded. Nothing succeeds like perseverance. * Heaven or hell – I don't care where I end up as long as it's where my friends are. I can't imagine happiness surrounded by dupes and charlatans. * Anonymous does not mean faceless. No degree of anonymity can hide the ego of a loud-mouth phony with the guts of a mouse and the memory of an elephant. * It happens to me all the time. After they find out what I am against, they accuse me of being for it. It makes sense, no? * If you speak the truth to a liar, he will come up with a bigger lie; and the bigger the better. And what could be bigger than choosing one's own tribe as God's Chosen, or one's own race as the Superior Race. And it came to pass that the Superior almost exterminated the Chosen, and the dumbest did the same to the smartest (self-assessed, of course). # Saturday, October 25, 2008 *********************************************** LIARS ***************************************** Sooner or later reality will step in and let you know in no uncertain terms that you are on the wrong track – as when after 600 years of subservience.... * If I repeat myself it's because there are ten thousand lies but only one truth. * I am an easy target. I can be silenced and buried as easily as a dog. But who can bury Socrates, Voltaire, and Gandhi whose ideas I have been paraphrasing? * Immortality? I have already achieved it in the minds of our liars. * Plato says somewhere that an honest man can never be as wealthy as a crook because, he explains, an honest man will employ only honest means to acquire his wealth, whereas a crook will employ honest as well as dishonest means. This may explain why you will never hear one of our benefactors say that he is an avid reader of Plato's dialogs. * Hirelings are not in the habit of questioning the competence and integrity of their bosses. To the publishers, editors, and moderators who have silenced me, I say: If a nation cannot survive the opinions of a minor scribbler, can it be worth saving? * When it comes to preserving their power, our bosses are more than willing to sacrifice the demands of justice and fundamental human rights. But when justice and human rights are denied to a single man, everyone should feel threatened. * A prophet is any man who speak about what he sees as opposed to what he is told to see. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted October 29, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 29, 2008 Sunday, October 26, 2008 *********************************************** DZOUR NESDINK SHIDAG KHOSINK ***************************************** We were deceived by the corrupt and degenerate West, we are told by way of justification. But that's not a justification. Only an unrepentant dupe and a damn fool would think of it as one. That's more like a confession and an admission of inadequacy and incompetence. All politics and diplomacy is based on deception. The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a statesman sees what's on the other side of the hill. The question we should ask ourselves is, Did we ever have a statesman as a leader? And even more to the point: Do we have one today? We have speechifiers and sermonizers by the dozen. But a statesman? And what is a speechifier if not a dealer in empty verbiage? What is a sermonizer if not a sanctimonious prick whose favorite motto is, “Do as I say not as I do” -- the words of a fornicator and a holier-than-thou windbag. Speaking of dupes and confessions: allow me to confess that I too am a dupe -- a dupe of the illusion that words make a difference. We are told “At the beginning was the word.” But we are no longer at the beginning. If anything we are closer to the end. And at the end, my friends, the word is garbage. # Monday, October 27, 2008 *********************************************** ANIMAL HOUSE ***************************************** Topix is the name of an Armenian discussion forum that is Armenian and a forum in name only. The Turks on this forum outnumber the Armenians and the discussion consists of a constant, endless, and monotonous barrage of insults, verbal abuse, and profanities; and when I say profanities I mean the kind that couples motherhood with prostitution and fornication; and the worst profanities are reserved not by Armenians for Turks, or vice versa, but by Armenians for Armenians. * The moderator of this forum identifies himself as an Armenian and I believe him because he leaves the profanities in and deletes my things on the grounds that he agrees with me only 80% of the time. And speaking of motherhood: one of the regular contributors to this forum identifies herself as a “mom” and she is one of my most dedicated readers and severest critics. I suspect she subscribes to the excrementalist school of criticism because her favorite descriptive term is “crap.” * Describe someone as objectively as you can and he will consider it the worst insult that anyone has ever inflicted on him. * When the majority of one group believes in one thing and the majority of another group believes the exact opposite, you can be sure of one thing: the brainwashers on both sides have been busy. * How do you convince someone who thinks he is smart that he may not be as smart as he thinks he is? It can't be done. Even if you reach the apex of your profession you can be taken in by an operator in some other line of work. Cases in point: both Hegel and Beethoven were taken in by Napoleon. That's because music, philosophy, and politics do not share the same values, vocabulary, and principles. # Tuesday, October 28, 2008 *********************************************** A TURNING POINT OR A DEAD END? ***************************************** During the Soviet era dissidents were labeled “enemies of the people” by commissars, to cover up the fact that they (commissars) were the true enemies. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Stalinists put the blame on dissidents. Catholics said the credit must go to the Polish Pope, and American said it was all Reagan's doing. I say it was Stalin's doing for the obvious reason that he systematically eliminated the best minds and promoted mediocrities without vision. Where there is no vision the people perish, and one cannot speak of vision where the blind lead the blind. What about us? Where do we stand? Has anything changed? Once upon a time our political leaders were intellectuals. They may have been daydreamers and losers but they were also men of principle. They believed in what they said. Today instead of intellectuals we have merchants and bureaucrats – anonymous, faceless, interchangeable nonentities whose number one concern is number one. In the Homeland they speechify like programmed zombies, and in the Diaspora they speak of fund-raising, never of accounting. But even if they spoke with the eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero combined I wouldn't believe a word they said. What I believe instead are the silent masses who vote with their feet. On the day the rate of immigration exceeds that of emigration I will feel justified in thinking we have been successful in arresting the downward spiral towards oblivion. Until then I will only say, I loathe deceivers, and I loathe their dupes even more because I was one of them. As for a renaissance of our arts and letters: if it happens, it will happen only after our Ottomanized, Sovietized, and Levantinized wheeler-dealers are exposed for what they really are – the gravediggers of the nation. # Wednesday, October 29, 2008 *********************************************** CONFESSIONS OF A FOOL ***************************************** “Excellent speech is not fitting for a fool.” PROVERBS 17:7 * “Let a man meet a bear robbed of her cubs, rather than a fool in his folly.” PROVERBS 17:12 * “A rebuke goes deeper into one who has understanding than a hundred blows into a fool.” PROVERBS 17:10 * Yesterday, while waiting at the emergency room (a wait that lasted seven hours) and after exhausting the available printed matter, I found a copy of the Gideon Bible, and again I was fascinated by the number of verses dedicated to fools. I like reading about fools for a number of reasons, one of them being that I was one most of my life, and I continue to be one today because I sometimes go as far as thinking that what I write matters. * Reading about fools amounts to reading about myself and about human nature in general. I suspect some day psychology will be known as foolology. * To be insulted by a fool is not an insult because that's what fools do when they don't understand something. To be praised by a fool – now, that's what I call a true insult. * Just because fools enjoy freedom of thought it doesn't mean they can think freely. * If a fool disagrees with you, you may be justified in suspecting you are on the right path. * When two fools agree, they think that have achieved wisdom. * The greatest comfort of a fool is the animal warmth of another fool. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted November 1, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 1, 2008 Thursday, October 30, 2008 *********************************************** DEFINITIONS ***************************************** VODANAVORJI: A fabricator of verses inspired by the eternal snows of Mount Ararat and related atrocities. * ANTI-SEMITE: An Armenian who loves Jews but hates Zionists. * ANTI-AMERICANISM: A belief system that asserts the serpent in the Garden of Eden was a CIA agent. * ANTI-ARMENIANISM: A capital offense committed by someone who dares to question the statesmanship of our wheeler-dealers, mi-kich-pogh Panchoonies, and assorted riffraff. * ARMENIANISM: A vaguely defined discipline that allows a charlatan, bloodsucker, or parasite to assert his superior brand of patriotism and look down at anyone who does not live up to its low standards, and when I say low I mean lower than a snake's belly full of buckshot. * BLAME-GAME: A favorite pastime of academics who ascribe all our misfortunes, blunders, defeats, and tragedies to historic, social, environmental, and cultural factors beyond our control. * DISSENTER: A misguided fool, an unspeakable blasphemer, and a degenerate who believes we may have had something to do in shaping our character and destiny as a nation. * INTELLECTUAL: A species as extinct as the dodo bird. * PUNDIT: A retard with a negative IQ who is convinced he knows and understands everything there is to know and understand about our past, present, and future, but who is incapable of telling a hole in the ground from the perforation in his derrière. * SOVIETISM: A mindset that asserts Russians to be our “Big Brothers.” * ANTI-SOVIETISM: A mindset that asserts Russians to be our “Big Brothers” but only in the Orwellian sense of these words. * TURCOCENTRISM: An Orthodoxy based on the assumption that we are dependent on the goodwill, fair-play, justice, and charity of Ankara. * OTTOMANISM: A psychological complex or a mechanism that results in the production of oreos – that is, Armenians who are Armenian on the outside and Turk on the inside. Something similar could be said of Bolshevism or Stalinism. It is no exaggeration to say that Armenians of the Diaspora are at the mercy of Ottomanized thugs as surely as Armenians of Armenia are victimized by Stalinized scumbags. # Friday, October 31, 2008 *********************************************** SUPERSTITIONS ***************************************** Elsa Morante: “Women's love brings bad luck.” That may be because everything that's good in step one may be bad in step two. Yin and yang. “No banquet under heaven is endless,” according to an old Chinese saying. * Like Armenians, both men and women like to blame their troubles on the opposition, never on their own stupidity. * The most famous war in in the history of mankind recounted by the greatest poet in world literature is about the abduction of a floozy. But I suspect if the same story were told by a woman, the stress would be on man's stupidity. For all we know Paris may have been a serial rapist and Helen a respectable housewife. * Speaking of war and stupidity: there are organized religions today that are against capital punishment but for war. Figure that one out if you can. * Speaking of floozies and man's stupidity: It is said of Antranik Zaroukian that on his return from Paris, where he was sent as a delegate by the ARF, he presented an expense account which included a line that said: “For necessary bodily functions.” When asked to explain, Zaroukian is said to have replied: “Visits to the bordello.” Somehow I find it difficult to imagine a woman delegate in the same position saying, “For services rendered by a gigolo.” # Saturday,November 1, 2008 *********************************************** AS I SEE IT ***************************************** Don Marquis: “If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.” * Even if you are as wise as Socrates and as pure in heart as Mahatma Gandhi you will have enemies who will hate you unto death. And even if you are as evil as Stalin and as fanatical and single-minded as Hitler you will have followers willing to die for you. * I for one refuse to ascribe beastly conduct to human nature. Neither will I subscribe to the notion favored by philomorons that philosophy is a waste of time. Because if it weren't for philosophers we would be at the mercy of fools and fanatics and life would be hell on earth. * A good autobiography is everyone's biography. * The greatest concern of a man in power is losing it. * The shy in life will be daring in imagination. * To read words and sentences – nothing easier. To read ideas – that's different. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted November 5, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 5, 2008 Sunday, November 2, 2008 *********************************************** BAND OF ROBBERS ***************************************** Saint Augustine: “What is the state without justice: A band of robbers.” I should like to hear one of our dime-a-dozen pundits and patriots say as much. As a matter of fact, the other day I did hear one of our speechifiers speaking about “the Armenia of our dreams...the dreams of our fathers and grandfathers...the alienation of youth...poverty...” and more to the point “a great deal remains to be done...” But he never went as far saying the challenge we confront today is converting a band of robbers to a band of brothers. * “The Armenia of our dreams!” What about the reality of our diaspora? Let's dream about that for a moment, shall we? A diaspora that speaks with one voice and treats all Armenians as brothers. A diaspora whose leaders treat the human right of free speech not as a Utopian illusion but as a basic requirement for any progressive community. What could be more self-serving and misleading for a diasporan boss than to speak of divisiveness, corruption, and alienation as if these were problems that needed to be solved only in the Homeland? What is a diaspora without mutual tolerance? What is a community that values entertainment, food, and sports above the exchange of ideas or the development of consensus? * Where there is no free speech, a braying jackass and a barking dog will enjoy more freedom of expression than an honest man. To those who say I have been silenced because I am wrong on all counts, I say, even a broken down clock shows the right time twice a day, and I ask: Who among us in infallible – our Turcocentric ghazetajis or the hirelings of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors who parrot their propaganda line? * What is the worth of a man who is afraid to say what must be said? # Monday, November 3, 2008 *********************************************** MEMOIRS ***************************************** It took me many years to find a job that I truly enjoyed doing, and when I finally did, no one had any use for me. * A LOSE/LOSE PROPOSITION ************************************ If you are wrong they will disagree with you. If you are right, they will disagree with you even more. * COMPROMISE ************************** Do we have a word for compromise? If we do, why is it that no one ever uses it – at least I for one have never heard anyone use it. * WHY WE ARE INTOLERANT OF CRITICISM **************************************************** Because we believe one should not mess with perfection. * AN ARMENIAN STORY ***************************** They asked the village idiot to translate the braying of an ass, and when he did, the villagers were divided between those who believed him and those who did not. There were no survivors. # Tuesday, November 4, 2008 *********************************************** CHOICES *********************** We either speak the truth or we conspire with liars. * Very often in life what we don't know or what is hidden from view matters much more than what we know. To make visible that which is invisible, that's the function of literature. The rest is either propaganda or escapism. * What is the worth of a dupe's “I believe,” or a child's Santa? * We choose to see only facts that support our prejudices and fallacies. All other facts are either ignored or don't register on our consciousness. * We see the best in ourselves and project the worst on others after which we confuse projecting with exorcism. # Wednesday, November 5, 2008 **************************************** SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY ******************************************** We slept with the enemy for 600 years – 600 long years during which instead of making history we acquired bad habits, subservience being one of them. Subservience to top dogs even when they are s.o.b.s, and contempt for underdogs even when they are honest men. Subservience to bosses, bishops, and benefactors, contempt for scribblers. Subservience to lies and contempt for the truth. * In an environment where wealth is seen as a blessing, I brag about my poverty if only because, in the words of Socrates, “my poverty is proof of my honesty” -- which might as well be a declaration of war against all liars. I have never owned a car or even a bicycle. I walk. I walk in all kinds of weather. I walk for miles. I walk even in snowstorms, and as I walk, I think of Dostoevsky on his way to the House of the Dead in Siberia. * The sev is in and the esh is out! To racists around the world, a day that will live in infamy. To underdogs everywhere, a giant step for mankind. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted November 8, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 8, 2008 Thursday, November 6, 2008 **************************************** A SERIAL HUSBAND ******************************************** Best-selling-author Michael Crichton of JURASSIC PARK fame dead of cancer at age 66. “A devoted husband,” according to his widow; “married five times,” according to the obituary. * ON POWER ********************* Power corrupted the Republicans under Bush not because the Republicans are more corruptible than the Democrats but because only saints are immune, and saints stay away from politics. Neither Thomas Mann nor Einstein were saints, but they were wise enough to say no when offered the position of head of state of East Germany and Israel respectively. As a “Mahatma” (great soul) Gandhi too rejected all positions of power in India. Obama may be America's answer to Gandhi and as such less corruptible than most politicians but the same will not be the case of everyone within his administration. * NOTA BENE ************************* More often than not, it is in our efforts to appear smarter that we expose ourselves as fools. # Friday, November 7, 2008 **************************************** WHITE TRASH (I) ******************************************** Where fools outnumber the wise, charlatanism will be confused with charisma. * Speaking of Sarah Palin, a Canadian pundit said something to the effect that she looked like a semi-porno queen and was popular with the white trash. True or false? Who cares! “Se non vero, ben trovato.” Freely translated: “Even if not true, it's damn good.” Anyone who says to see Russia from one's porch is to know and understand them deserves it. * WHITE TRASH (II) ************************************ Because the first Armenian writer I translated into English was a Tashnak, I was identified as a member of the Party by the opposition. And when ten years later they realized they had been wrong, they offered to hire my services. They said they were willing to pay a goodly sum (I don't remember exactly how much – probably less than minimum wage) if I were to write biographical profiles of Ramgavar leaders. I informed them I was not qualified to do that because I didn't even know who they were. That's when I acquired the reputation of being an ingrate and an enemy of the people. * WHITE TRASH (III) ************************************ A friend in Toronto tells me he plans to attend a lecture on “Good Turks” by one of our prominent academics. Next I hope this academic will consider a lecture on “Bad Armenians.” You may not believe they exist, but take my word for it, they do. Like all nations, we too have our share of white trash who consider themselves la crème de la crème. Speaking of good Turks: during the last few years I have made a few Turkish friends, which also means ten times as many Armenian enemies. I am not complaining. My worst enemies have also been my best sources of inspiration. If it weren't for them I would now be busy entertaining the bourgeoisie by writing love stories. * WHITE TRASH (IV) ******************************************** Raffi: “Our capitalists and merchants are the most corrupt and degenerate members of the community. Nothing good can come out of them. These people worship only money. They are men without a country. They belong to no nation on earth. Profit is their only homeland.” * Raffi: “We don't have an aristocracy. We have no elites and no leaders. What we have are merchants and clergymen. Merchants are trash. As for the clergy: they have always been against individual freedom.” # Saturday, November 8, 2008 **************************************** BIG LIES ******************************************** Insult an Armenian once and he will spend the rest of his life trying to get even. An eye for an eye is no longer good enough for him. He wants both eyes, ears, tongue, arms, legs, and a vital organ. An insulted Armenian ceases being an Armenian and becomes a Turkish viper. * Once in a while I am told I should not expose our failings in open forums. Why not? Our writers have been exposing our failings and contradictions intramurally with no effect. Shaming our dividers and gravediggers in the eyes of the world may be more effective. * A committed Armenian speaks in the name of a belief system and all belief systems create dupes as surely as chickens create eggs. With one difference. Eggs can be consumed. * The only time priests, rabbis, and mullahs speak the truth is when they call one another liars. * Organized religions are useful in so far as they stress the importance of morality in human affairs. But they also introduce prejudice which is the source of intolerance and countless crimes against humanity. Monopoly on truth is not just a lie but the Biggest Lie ever conceived by men. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted November 12, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 12, 2008 Sunday, November 9, 2008 **************************************** THE DARK SIDE ******************************************** All power structures, be they tribes, nations, empires, cultures, and civilizations, have a dark side, and I don't mean here only empires like the Roman, Mongol, Ottoman and Soviet empires, but also “free,” “democratic,” “civilized,” and “progressive” empires like the United States of America that saw nothing inconsistent in declaring “All men are created equal” and practicing slavery, discrimination, and even ethnic cleansing, in addition to legitimizing and supporting some of the most corrupt regimes of the 20th century. What about our dark side? If we have one, who speaks of it? To answer this question I once published a DICTIONARY OF ARMENIAN QUOTATIONS in which I selected passages from the works of prominent writers from the 5th century (our Golden Age) to the present, beginning with Khorenatsi and Yeghishé to Zarian and Zaroukian, all of whom have exposed our dark side, namely the corruption, incompetence, and divisiveness of our leadership and its dupes. * The other day when I quoted Raffi in an essay, I was told by a gentle reader that things have improved since then and Raffi's dissenting views don't apply because we no longer live in the 19th but in the 21st century. To this reader I suggest he read such 20th century representative writers as Issahakian, Zohrab, Shahnour, Massikian, Zarian and Zaroukian to see that there has been no progress in our institutional life and that things have been getting worse rather than better. And if we no longer have respected writers today willing to speak of our dark side it's because our bosses, bishops, benefactors and their hirelings have been more intolerant and ruthless in silencing anyone who refuses to recycle their benevolent and paternalistic propaganda line whose message is, we never had it so good because we are in the best of hands. As a result, we now have a generation of dupes so thoroughly brainwashed that they call anyone who refuses to live in their fool's paradise a liar, an idiot, and a dispenser of verbal crap. * This morning, on the radio, in an interview, Farley Mowat, a Canadian author of 87 books: “I was a victim of the propaganda of our time.” # Monday, November 10, 2008 **************************************** ANALYSIS ******************************************** Analysis: “Separation of a thing into the parts of which it is composed.” Also a method of reasoning or treatment that may lead to an objective assessment or accurate diagnosis. * Siamanto: “Our perennial enemy – the enemy that will eventually destroy us – is not the Turk but our own complacent superficiality.” “Complacent superficiality”: A diplomatic circumlocution for stupidity; a reluctance of going beyond appearances; a phobia of depth; also a fondness for easy answers flattering to the ego. * Why did Abovian commit suicide? Why did Raffi say “Treason and betrayal are in our blood”? Why did Gomidas take refuge in insanity? What was it that prompted Zarian to say, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another”? If you ask these questions to a boss, he will speak of our heroic past and love of freedom. What he will not do is quote the secret and unspoken motto of our revolutionaries: “When the going gets tough, the tough take flight.” If you ask a bishop, he will quote a line from the Bible but never the right line, such as “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” or “Where there is no vision the people perish.” (Speaking of vision: We are the offspring of men who for 600 years kissed Turkish butt; and when it wasn't Turkish butt it was Russian butt. At the center of our vision there has always been a butt.) If you ask a benefactor, the very best he can do is write you a check and suggest you see a shrink. His business is making money, not analyzing the collective unconscious of the nation; and money for him is the alpha and omega of all human wisdom. * Another question: why is it that our greatest literary masterpiece is the LAMENTATION by Naregatsi (our Dante and Shakespeare combined) which consists of an endless catalog of sins, vices, failings, and aberrations? * Nigoghos Sarafian: “Our history is a litany of lamentation, dread, and massacre. Also deception and abysmal naiveté mixed with the smoke of incense and the sound of sacred chants.” * Hagop Baronian: “Truth is a language that if not spoken is forgotten.” * For more quotations relevant to our malaise (another circumlocution for collective insanity) that our pundits and ghazetajis pretend not to know and our brainwashed dupes hate to know, see my DICTIONARY OF ARMENIAN QUOTATIONS. # Tuesday, November 11, 2008 **************************************** REFLECTIONS OF A GIAOUR ******************************************** We don't choose our parents, nationality, and religion. Most people born and raised in Muslim or Christian countries are Muslim and Christian respectively, and they all share the conviction that theirs is the only true religion and all others are heresies and their followers infidels destined to burn in hell for all eternity. Most Germans born and raised in Hitler's Germany were fascists, and most Soviets in the USSR of Stalin were communists. They were, in other words, very much like Muslims and Christians, cases of arrested development. * To those who verbally abuse me whenever they disagree with what I say, I ask: How old were you when you acquired the infallible views you hold today? And more often than not I don't even have to wait for an answer to add: “No further questions!” * Patriotism is a noble sentiment. If anything it should make a man a better person. That is why I don't believe a word of what a garbage-mouth dupe says when he speaks in the name of patriotism or he expects me to believe his brand of patriotism or belief system is a cut above mine, and he is therefore qualified to look down at me as an enemy of the people, a heretic, and an infidel whose fundamental human rights can be violated with a clear conscience. # Wednesday, November 12, 2008 **************************************** UNPLEASANT ENCOUNTERS ******************************************** Most Armenian disagreements boil down to one side insisting that his hearsay evidence is more admissible than your eyewitness account. * To acquaint yourself with the kind of hatred that leads one nation to exterminate another, follow an argument between two anonymous Armenians in a discussion forum. * A jackass is equipped to understand only the braying of another jackass. To paraphrase a popular Turkish saying: “What the hell does a jackass know about khoshaf (stewed raisins)?” * If your perception of reality is based on what our nationalist historians, bosses, and bishops say, in what way are you different from a Turk who has been exposed only to the propaganda line of his nationalist historians, mullahs, and Kemal? * If I sound stupid sometimes it's because I want to be accessible to my audience. * There is a type of “inknahaivan” dupe (self-satisfied jackass) who will believe anything that flatters his ego. * To those of my readers who would like to dance on my grave, I say, if you die before I do, I shall mourn the loss of a Muse. * A gentleman does not insult another anonymously. To paraphrase a sexist Turkish saying (with apolos to the ladies on this forum): “Among ten men nine are sure to be women.” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted November 15, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 15, 2008 Thursday, November 13, 2008 **************************************** JACK S. AVANAKIAN ******************************************** After the first profanity, I stop reading. If you have read one garbage-mouth anonymous Jack S. Avanakian, you have read them all. They might as well be xerox copies of one another. * Never call a self-assessed Armenian genius an inbred moron. If you do, he will be so blinded by hatred that in his efforts to prove you wrong, he will spend the rest of his life proving you right. That's because hatred makes a man stupid, and no one can be as stupid as a self-assessed genius. * I remember a friend telling me: “Do you know why there are no famous Armenian mountain climbers? Armenians are jumpers. They want to reach the top with a single jump.” * When a fanatic speaks of patriotism, he means love of country and contempt for countrymen who do not share his fanaticism. Give such an Armenian enough power and he will start by exterminating his fellow Armenians before he tackles the Turks. * Being Armenian looks easy only in Saroyan’s fiction. In reality it is such a demanding enterprise that most Armenians give up the effort and assimilate, and I for one do not blame them. * There is a type of Armenian who thinks just because he is an Armenian he is also an expert in Armenian affairs, which is like saying, just because an elephant is an elephant he is also an expert in zoology. Did I say elephant? Make it jackass. # Friday, November 14, 2008 **************************************** MY TWO CENTS ******************************************** The worst way of solving a problem is by silencing those who speak of it. Likewise, the only way to be positive is by ignoring or covering up the negative. If I am classified as negative it may be because the only way to be positive in our environment is by lying. And the beauty about political lies is that more often than not you don't even have to invent them, it will be done for you. * “The Russians are our Big Brothers.” “Mer hairenik, azad angakh.” “We are Armenians!” I have always wondered what the hell that meant. “We are all Armenians!” Odian makes fun of that one in his COMRADE PANCHOONIE: “'We are all Armenians, we are brothers. Why can't we live together? Why must we fight?' That filthy bourgeois kept repeating, not being able to comprehend that conflict is the basic condition of life...'” thus Panchoonie in one of his regular reports to the Central Committee that invariably end with the immortal punch line: “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek,” which is now the favorite mantra of our dime-a-dozen fund raisers. “Mart bidi ch'ellank!” I see more truth in that punch line than in all the speeches and sermons delivered by our windbags. * When told to “give them hell,” an American presidential candidate (may have been Truman) is quoted as having said: “I don't do that. I tell them the truth and they think they are in hell.” You may now draw your own conclusions. # Saturday, November 15, 2008 **************************************** ASSH***/s ******************************************** When Nixon called Trudeau “an assh***” Trudeau is said to have commented: “I have been called worse names by better people.” Meaning: If I can survive the verbal abuse of good men, why should I give a damn what riffraff think of me? * The eminent Canadian poet Irving Layton on his critics: “Just because they have an assh*** they think they are entitled to an opinion.” He delivered this line to an audience of librarians, schoolteachers, and students. * For a year I worked in a chain of department stores, first as a stockboy then as an assistant to a manager who expected me to adopt him as a role model. Once he bragged about being the youngest manager in the history of chain stores in Canada. Shortly thereafter Wal-Mart drove our chain stores out of business. * “You are a fool,” a gentle reader informs me. I suspect this reader will hang himself on the day he decides to read a wise writer. But if history teaches us anything it is that when a truly wise man appears, all the assh***s of the world conspire against him. Perhaps I owe my survival to my limitations. * There is a new book out titled DO ANTS HAVE ARSEHOLES? -- AND 101 OTHER BLOODY RIDICULOUS QUESTIONS. (The answer, by the way, is yes, they do.) * I for one do not underestimate the cunning of fools – after all, they run the world. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted November 22, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 22, 2008 Sunday, November 16, 2008 **************************************** SUMMING UP ******************************************** History is one because the past is one, and even God, it has been said, cannot change the past. * Nations disagree on what happened because they invent their own past. This is common knowledge among historians but not among dupes who in all times and everywhere outnumber historians by a million or even ten million to one. * When political leaders speak of principles, what they don't tell you is that their most important principle is their power. * When a man makes a big mistake, he ruins his life. When a political leader makes a big mistake, he ruins the nation. But a political leader has an advantage over an ordinary citizen: he can rewrite history, because power also means the power to misrepresent and mislead. * The surest way of creating dupes is by controlling the educational system,. * In a civilized environment dissident writers are awarded the Nobel Prize (Mann, Shaw, Sartre). In an uncivilized environment dissidents are silenced, exiled, starved, shot or driven to suicide. * Sometimes to rewrite history does not mean to invent lies. One may also rewrite history by selecting facts. Hence the definition of propaganda as “a fraction of the truth.” * One way to deceive dupes is by first flattering them into believing they are smart, progressive, civilized, and superior to all others, and therefore impossible to deceive. * One index of barbarism is intolerance, and intolerance means first and foremost tolerance of prejudice, lies, and injustice – all in the name of patriotism of course. * The more backward a nation, the greater the number of its bullies, thugs, fanatics, and fools who operate on the assumption that truth is on their side and anyone who dares to say otherwise is either a misguided simpleton or an enemy of the people. * One way to judge the health of a nation is by its creative impetus. When we brag about our Golden Age and our medieval music and architecture, we tacitly and unknowingly admit that when we lost our independence and adopted subservience as a way of life, we also lost an important fraction of our creative impetus, our identity, and our humanity. # Monday, November 17, 2008 **************************************** “I AM A PROUD ARMENIAN,” SIGNED “ANONYMOUS” ******************************************** For every proud Armenian there are probably ten, perhaps even twenty proud Turks. So that if we adopt pride as a weapon, we lose once more. Instead of saying “I am a proud Armenian,” let us learn and teach others to say : “I am a humble human being and all men are my brothers.” * For everyone who says I am a proud Armenian, there are probably as many not so proud Armenians who cannot speak Armenian, bear foreign names, are married to odars, and stay away from Armenian community centers, schools, and churches. * The average Armenian (assuming such a creature exists) probably has more friends among Turks than among Armenians, if only because half of Turks are probably half-Armenian. * I have never heard an Armenian say “I am a proud half-Armenian,” even if most Armenians are exactly that. I have said this before and it bears repeating: on a good day I can trace my roots all the way back to my father. * The so-called loud-mouth proud Armenian who proclaims his patriotism anonymously from the gutter and by means of insults and profanities against anyone who dares to disagree with his infallible views (which on closer inspection turn out to be misconceptions, fallacies, and prejudices) is the very best argument against himself. * To say “I am a proud Armenian” amounts to rattling one's chains of subservience and degradation. # Tuesday, November 18, 2008 **************************************** VARIATIONS ON A FAMILIAR TUNE ******************************************** “Every other Armenian is a critic,” I am told. “Do we need another one?” Or: “What we need is solutions, not criticism.” I agree, and I don't mind admitting that when it comes to solving our problems I have been a total failure. But then, how many of our problems did Khorenatsi, Naregatsi, Shnorhali, Abovian, Raffi, and Zarian solve? It is to be noted that both Khorenatsi and Naregatsi wrote a LAMENTATION, and Abovian's masterpiece is titled VERK HAYASTANI. As far as I know, none of our writers ever wrote a book or a poem titled SOLUTIONS. * Perhaps what we need is not writers but a Messiah. But I suspect as soon as we get one, we will crucify him because the first thing he will do is drive our bosses, bishops, benefactors, and all their hirelings and brown-nosers out of the temple with a whip. I also suspect, if he lives long enough to deliver a sermon, he will not provide verbal solutions but say, “The solution to your problems, very much like the Kingdom of God, is within you.” * Don't get me wrong. Armenians have a deep-seated respect for writers, messiahs, and ideas, provided of course they are not of domestic but foreign provenance. Consider the three most important ideas that have shaped our character and destiny as a nation: Christianity, nationalism, and Marxism. Not only have we adopted these ideas as our own but we have also shed our blood in their defense. But then we have shed blood in defense of even the Ottoman and Soviet empires. During World War II, we fought on both sides of the front. And no matter how hard I try I cannot think of a single instance when a single Armenian shed a single drop of blood in defense of an Armenian idea. # Wednesday, November 19, 2008 **************************************** DOUBTS AND CERTAINTIES ******************************************** In life doubts outnumber certainties. * Beware of the man who has more answers than questions. * There are no final answers. If an answer does not raise two more questions it cannot be right. * Only dupes and fanatics have more answers than questions. * No one can save a man, let alone a nation, that has chosen to take the road leading to self-destruction. * The most interesting man in the world is a bore to himself. Hence the old Armenian saying: "Marte martov g’ella." A man is made [whole] by another. * If a bigot is not yet a killer, it may be because history has not yet given him an opportunity to act out his convictions. * Religion, nationality, ideology: in so far as they enhance our understanding, they are assets. In so far as they raise walls between us and our fellow men, they are liabilities. * We don't need a messiah to do the right thing. But if you choose to wait for one, be prepared to wait for two thousand years, and even then... * I come up with an 11th Commandment every other day. I've got two of them today: “Thou shalt not be a dupe,” and “Thou shalt not say 'We need solutions,” when what you really mean is 'Shut up!'” * My aim in life is not to solve problems but to be readable. If I achieve that goal I may some day, if I live long enough, to stumble of an insightful line. # Thursday, November 20, 2008 **************************************** ON FREE SPEECH ******************************************** I believe in free speech for two important reasons: (one) It is a fundamental human right, and (two) Armenians don't believe in it, which is another thing they share in common with the Turks. With one difference however: the Turks have a law against “offending Turkishness” -- a misguided law, granted; even a foolish law, also granted. But a law nonetheless. The same applies to commissars in the Soviet era: they did whatever they did in accordance with the laws of the land. Unlike Turks and Soviets, we don't have a corresponding law that authorizes anyone, even the wisest among us, to violate anyone's fundamental human right of free speech. What we have are pseudo-patriotic neo-Stalinist self-appointed commissars who behave with the inflexible conviction that they know best what's good for the nation. It never even occurs to them that a great many of our defeats, catastrophes, and tragedies are a direct result of his misconception. # Friday, November 21, 2008 **************************************** ON SOLUTIONS ******************************************** If you think of solutions as verbal formulas, you will never find them. * THE LESSONS OF THE PAST ************************************* Whenever I quote Naregatsi or Raffi, I am told I live in the past. Translation: history is bunk and literature a waste of time. And I think of Bazarov, the nihilist in Turgenev's FATHERS AND SONS. I also think of Tolstoy who at the end of his life gave up literature, hated Shakespeare, and became a born-again Christian atheist whose central idea was “the Kingdom of God is within you.” Unlike Bazarov, Tolstoy didn't kill himself but ran away from home and died at a train station in the middle of nowhere. * EXPLANATION (I) ******************************** If I am harsh with meddlers it's because I am not running for office and I don't mind if I lose to the opposition – as long as I am allowed to do my work without needless interruptions. I may be hungry but not to the point of starvation and willing to say “Yes, sir!” to anyone who dangles a carrot at me. * ANOTHER 11th COMMANDMENT *********************************************** Had Moses been an Armenian I suspect he would have come down with a commandment that says something to the effect that one should not confuse the dung heap in one's backyard with Mount Ararat. * EXPLANATION (II) ******************************* Stupidity is infectious and wisdom is not transferable: that's the only way to explain mass movements, wars, and massacres. # Saturday, November 22, 2008 **************************************** DECLINE AND FALL ******************************************** For eight years I worked in a large financial institution. There was such an accumulation of petty little rules and regulations that there was only one old man in our department who remembered them all. Once when I dared to suggest that these rules could be easily simplified and streamlined I was treated as a blasphemer and even my co-workers turned against me. One way to explain the collapse of these institutions in America today is by saying that they concentrated so much on meaningless rules and regulations that they lost sight of the essential and collapsed beneath the weight of their own bureaucratic inflexibility. * It has been said that truth is found at the end of an obstacle course of errors. For those ready to admit error, the obstacle course is short; for the infallible, it is endless. * Give a good Armenian anonymity and a computer and watch him behave like a bad Turk. * “We are doing our best” is not the same as “We could do better.” * Never ask for solutions if your are in no position to introduce and implement new policies. * Tina Brown: “It's great when people trash you, it means you are interesting.” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted November 26, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 26, 2008 Sunday, November 23, 2008 **************************************** WE ARE CIVILIZED PEOPLE ******************************************** An investigative reporter has been severely beaten up in Armenia. We don't do that sort of thing here. We are not Asiatic barbarians. We are civilized. Besides, it's against the law. In the words of an Armenian moderator: “No four-letter words on this forum, please! We don't go for that shit.” Our brothers in the Homeland may operate within a lawless environment. We don't. That's a luxury we can't afford. We are civilized people. If we want to have someone silenced, we simply shut him up. It's the easiest thing in the world. All it takes is a phone call to the publisher. Not even the need to mention withdrawal of financial support. Yes, sir! We are a civilized bunch here. Not Asiatic barbarians. This is a rule and like all rules it has its exceptions, of course. Once, when the editor/publisher of a California weekly allowed the publication of an exposé, he was beaten within an inch of his life. The perps were never caught. It was rumored that they were imported talent and by the time the crime was reported to the police, they were on their way to the Middle East somewhere. On another occasion, when the editor/publisher of another weekly published an exposé about the tax-deductible shenanigans of one of our charitable institutions, he was dragged to court, was almost taken to the cleaners, had a stroke, and lost on a technicality because, unlike the charitable institution, he couldn't afford belly-slitting lawyers who were fully aware of the fact that the reporter's “deep throats” would refuse to testify for him because doing so would mean losing their only source of income. It is the height of hypocrisy to express outrage at a beaten up investigative reporter in Armenia and completely ignore the filth in which we are drowning here. We preach democracy there but we practice fascism here and we refuse to see a contradiction. And we refuse to see a contradiction because this convenient blindness allows us to assume a holier-than-thou stance, and we are all addicted to asserting moral and patriotic superiority. Yes, sir! We are not Asiatic barbarians here. We are syphilized people. # Monday, November 24, 2008 **************************************** URBAN LEGENDS ******************************************** Racial superiority is an urban legend fabricated by inflated egos for inferior minds. * Some say Cain was a Turk, and Abel an Armenian. Others say it was the other way around. * ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS *********************************** Give an Armenian fanatic anonymity and a computer with Internet access and watch him commit verbal massacre. * Give Armenians a superior army and an inferior enemy and watch them commit crimes against humanity, and afterwards pass a law against insulting Armenishness. * NOTA BENE ************************ We hate the enemy because we understand ourselves. * All organized religions have failed. If they continue to have followers it's because any meaning, even when meaningless, is better than no meaning. * Strong convictions are the surest symptoms of weak minds. * SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE **************************************** To brainwash an Armenian is easy, to reason with him, impossible. I was brainwashed once and was not open to reason or, for that matter, to common sense and decency, let alone Christian compassion and Kantian ethics. # Tuesday, November 25, 2008 **************************************** PIRATES ******************************************** What is the difference between Somalian pirates who hijack cargo ships and demand ransom money on the one hand, and on the other, American chief executive officers who run their company to the ground, give themselves fat salaries and handsome bonuses, travel by private jet, and demand billions from tax-payers? Two differences: (one) the pirates' financial demands are infinitely more modest, and (two) when caught, the pirates are treated like common criminals. * HIJACKERS OF CULTURE *************************************** All of German literature, philosophy, and music produced Hitler. All of Armenian literature, music, and architecture produced the morally bankrupt loud-mouth philistine who parades as defender of the faith and is taken seriously by dupes. * ENEMIES ************************* When an Armenian disagrees with you, he disagrees not only with your views but also with your existence. The Golden Age of this type of Armenian was turn-of-the-century Istanbul, and the first decades of the Soviet era when all it took was an anonymous phone call to the authorities. * It goes without saying that if you speak in defense of human rights, free speech, and democracy, you will acquire fascist enemies. # Wednesday, November 26, 2008 **************************************** TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE ******************************************** A church is first and foremost a house of God, and I have no doubt whatever in my mind that the Good Lord would welcome Catholic as well as Protestant and Loussavorchagan (both Etchmiadznagan and Cilician) worshipers within His walls. Consider the millions we could save for the needy in the Homeland and in the process may be even save the soul of the community. I am not talking about church unity here, only of putting existing real estate to more responsible use. Needless to add, what I say about churches also applies to community centers and schools. * An insider once told me, one of the two Armenian cathedrals in New York City employs as many as 83 people, among them professional fund-raisers, in addition to advertising the sale of Oriental rugs within its walls (including rugs made in Turkey) in the NEW YORK TIMES. * Why do we need two bishops when one would be more than enough? I once knew a bishop who had so much time on his hands that he wrote derivative poetry, which is what I said in my review of his first collection of verse. That may have put an end to his career as a vodanavorji, because I never heard from him again. * To end these depressing thoughts on a positive note: It is said of two Armenians on a desert island that they built three churches. When asked by their rescuers about the purpose of the third church, they had explained: “That's the one we don't go to.” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted November 29, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 29, 2008 Thursday, November 27, 2008 **************************************** THE BIGGER THEY ARE THE HARDER THEY FALL ******************************************** We are told again and again that some financial institutions and industries in America are too big to fail. What nonsense! Empires rise and fall, and when they fall, people are liberated from the grip of bloodsuckers. Who are the bloodsuckers today? If you ask chief executive officers, they will name the unions and their bosses, never their own greed and incompetence. * Mighty empires are not born but made, and they are made by an elite of creative people who successfully confront challenges and solve problems. But in time these creative individuals are followed by incompetent and corrupt operators without vision. That's when empires decline and fall. The same applies to major economic enterprises. But don't expect the executives to admit as much because, like Armenians, they are masters of the blame game. They will blame everyone but themselves. Their blindness is such that they will travel by private jet and beg taxpayers' money, and they will do this with the arrogant certainty they are too big to fail. Sooner or later, however, they will have to come to terms with reality, which is, not even God can save a man or a power structure that is set on self-destruction. * The USSR was bigger than all the financial institutions and car manufacturers in America combined, but neither Marx and Engels, nor Lenin and Stalin could postpone its disintegration by a fraction of a second. The same applies to Ford, Freddie Mac, and the rest. Reality has fixed the time of their downfall, and neither Bush nor Obama can alter it. # Friday, November 28, 2008 **************************************** FIVE FAVORITE BOOKS ******************************************** THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann. What Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are to German music, Mann is to German literature. * RECONSIDERATIONS: Volume 12 of A STUDY OF HISTORY by Arnold J. Toynbee. Beneath a proper, academic veneer, Toynbee is a thoroughly anti-establishment thinker. * THE SABRES OF PARADISE by Lesley Blanch. A history of 19th-century Caucasus that reads like a historical novel by Dumas and Tolstoy. * LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov. The magic of a brilliant stylist transforms a continental pedophile and a spoiled American brat into fascinating Dostoevskian characters. * FAREWELL, MY LOVELY by Raymond Chandler. In his hand American slang acquires the irresistible charm of pure poetry, and Los Angeles becomes as mesmerizing a place as Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg, Mann's Davos, and Lesley Blanch's Caucasus. * These are not books to be read once, but faithful companions to be cherished to the end of one's life. * P.S. I have not mentioned books from our literature because I don't wish to make myself vulnerable to the charge of promoting my own work as translator. # Saturday, November 29, 2008 **************************************** A REPUBLIC OF LIES ******************************************** In the republic of charlatans, honest men are outlaws. * It is not at all unusual for a man to believe in his own lies. That's the only way to explain why some smart people make dumb assertions. To lie is not only cowardly but also a direct assault on our intelligence. * We are a very young democracy, I am informed once in a while. We shouldn't be too critical of the regime. I am also told we are “the cradle of civilization.” I feel therefore justified in asking what is so civilized about greed, corruption, incompetence, and abuse of power? Unless of course we are willing to concede that after living under barbarians for many centuries, we have adopted their ways and it may take many more centuries for us to recover our status as civilized human beings. * Being critical of Armenians in open forums may reflect badly on us, I am also told. But this amounts to saying we can't afford being honest in public – and that to me is the greatest insult that can be leveled against the nation. * Wellington's dictum on British soldiers: “the scum of the earth enlisted for drink.” * Think of an Armenian friend as a potential enemy and he will not disappoint you. * Perhaps what I am trying to do is educating not my fellow Armenians but myself, and by educating myself I mean recovering my humanity; and if I ever succeed in that endeavor, I will fall silent because “he who speaks does not know.” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted December 3, 2008 Author Report Share Posted December 3, 2008 Sunday, November 30, 2008 **************************************** BOMBAY ******************************************** We may call it Mumbai, but i am told Indians themselves prefer to call it Bombay. * MUSLIM TERRORISM IN INDIA *************************************** “Hindus and Muslims must work together to overcome rising level of terrorism in India,” reads a headline of a commentary by a pundit. What this pundit doesn't tell us is that Muslim resentment against Hindus in India runs as deep as Armenian resentment against Turks, Black resentment against Whites, and Jewish resentment against anti-Semites (who now prefer to identify themselves as anti-Zionists). Hinduism is said to be one of the most tolerant religions. Not so from the perspective of the Untouchables who, following the Muslim conquests in India, converted to Islam because they were told, in the eyes of Allah all men are equal. In the eyes of Allah, maybe; but in the eyes of their fellow Hindus they continued to be treated as subhuman Untouchables. Which meant they had to put up with a lot of Hindu crap (literally). I am not justifying terrorism, only providing the context. * THE HOMELAND AND THE DIASPORA ****************************************** In Armenia we have a regime. In the Diaspora we have a dysfunctional collection of communities with tribal loyalties. In that sense, the Homeland is ahead of us. Some day there may be progress there. I am less optimistic about the Diaspora. * OUR PROBLEMS ********************************* They are as old as mankind. So are their solutions. When someone says “we need solutions,” he speaks two lies: (one) mankind has at no time experienced what we are experiencing today; and (two) all of human thought moves in a dimension that is outside our orbit. # Monday, December 1, 2008 **************************************** WANTED: MANDELA ********************************* In the opinion page of our paper I read this morning that Nelson Mandela's struggle against apartheid was one reason why Obama decided to enter politics. I suspect several other names had something to do with that decision, among them Martin Luther King, whose role model was Gandhi, who in his turn was greatly influenced by Tolstoy's doctrine of non-violence and Thoreau's ideas on civil disobedience. Mandela reminds me of a reader who once sent me a venomous e-mail in which the kindest thing he said was that I was a total failure and I would never amount to anything because I did not qualify as Armenia's Nelson Mandela. All I can say in my defense is that I have been and continue to be a great admirer of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi. * Internecine conflict is the opium of the Armenians, oneupmanship their favorite pursuit, and the blame-game their favorite sport. * If all anti-Semites are as dumb as Armenian anti-Semites, the Jews are justified in clinging to the absurd notion that they are the Chosen. * When liars speak of freedom, they mean the freedom to brainwash and deceive. * Every superficial explanation echoes a propaganda line and appears to make perfect sense to those who think they are thinking. That is why the world is in the kind of mess it is in. * The problem: we are what we have become because we are not open to explanations. The solution: tabula rasa, or the assumption that we know nothing or everything we know is without foundation in reality. Not an easy position to assume for an Armenian who has been brainwashed to believe he is smart, he knows all he needs to know, he knows better, and if explanations are needed, they will flow from him, never from the opposite direction. * I don't write for readers who know better but for readers who are as confused as I am, readers who have more questions than answers, more doubts than certainties, more ignorance than knowledge, readers who are more foolish than wise. If I were half as wise as most of my readers, I would say, if hell is your destination, who am I to obstruct your path? # Tuesday, December 2, 2008 **************************************** ARMENIANS IN ISTANBUL ********************************* In his superbly illustrated coffee-table book, NEW EUROPE, Michael Palin has a section on Armenians in Istanbul, where he discusses the assassination of Hrant Dink, the photographer Ara Guler (“a Jew and also an Armenian”), and “a debonair art dealer” by the name of Raffi Portakal. * No need to read any further: I may be repeating myself. But then, what choice do I have? Suppose you have a suicidal friend: what choice do you have but to keep telling him life is better than death, until he realizes he has been on the wrong path and chooses to embrace life with all its failures, miseries, and troubles, like the rest of mankind. * If our perception of reality has been shaped by our educational system, in what way are we different from the average Turk? Next question: To what extent our leadership uses Turkish criminal conduct to cover up its own blunders and incompetence? For more on the moral and intellectual degeneration of our turn-of-the-century leadership in the Ottoman Empire, read Baronian and Odian, most of whose works, for obvious reasons, are not available in English. * A gentleman never insults another anonymously. I dare anyone to enter an Armenian discussion forum where anonymity is the rule and find there a single gentleman, or for that matter, lady. * And speaking of anonymous Armenians: you may notice that the more patriotic they are, the lower they sink. # Wednesday, December 23, 2008 **************************************** HISTORIANS, METAHISTORIANS, GHAZETAJIS AND PROPAGANDISTS ************************************************** History is not a science or a belief system, but an art. Instead of saying, I believe this is what happened, we should say, according to some historians or eyewitness accounts, or official documents, etc. Trial lawyers will tell you eyewitness accounts are not always reliable; official documents can be doctored, edited, selected, destroyed, and even forged; and for every historian who says one thing there will be another who says something else and sometimes even the exact opposite. This is especially true of nationalist historians who are ideologically or politically compromised. In the eyes of metahistorians (philosophers of history like Spengler and Toynbee) nationalist historians are no better than propagandists. Speaking of Toynbee: it is widely known that he at no time denied the reality of the Armenian genocide, and this even after he acquired Turkish friends, heard their side of the story, became a Turcophile, and learned the Turkish language. The difference between Toynbee and our nationalist historians is that Toynbee exposed not only the criminal conduct of the Turks but also the blunders of our own leadership, something our historians have at no time dared to do; which may suggest they have not dared to say everything that needed to be said; in other words, their version of the past is only partly true (which is also how propaganda is defined). I feel therefore justified in suggesting that under the guise of supporting our cause, our nationalist historians and Turcocentric ghazetajis have succeeded only in damaging our credibility in the eyes of the world and thus reducing the issue to the status of political football. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted December 10, 2008 Author Report Share Posted December 10, 2008 Sunday, December 7, 2008 **************************************** ON EDITORS AND MODERATORS ************************************************** When I am told there are divisions even in the best and most progressive nations, all I can say is that they can afford them. * Diasporan Armenians, who have not solved a single minor problem in their own community, think they are fully qualified to solve problems in Armenia on the grounds that the farther away a problem is, the easier it is to solve it. * A nation whose mullahs and priests outnumber its intellectuals is a nation on its way to the devil. * If we have more money we would have fewer problems, or so we like to think. This may explain why there are thousands of crooks on the Internet who are eager to share their wealth with us. Problems attract charlatans the way carrion attracts vultures. * I have readers who review my writings the way pigeons review statues. * What our editors and moderators share in common is fear of free speech, and of all fears, fear of free speech is the most cowardly. * To violate human rights is to support those who plot the destruction of the nation. * When it comes to free speech, our editors and moderators have made even of America another USSR. * Only fascist regimes violate human rights with impunity. Only fascist regimes commit genocide. All genocides begin with the violation of the human right of a single individual. # Monday, December 8, 2008 **************************************** FREEDOMLAND ************************************************** My guess is, I would have been a better Christian had I been given the opportunity to choose being one. Likewise, I would have been a better human being, perhaps even a better Armenian, had I not been programmed to identify myself as one. As a teenager in Italy I would wonder why successful Italian-Americans would choose to share their existence with foreigners when they could afford to live with their brothers and sister in their own lovely homeland. It never occurred to me to think that an Italian, any Italian, would prefer to identify himself as an American. Brought up in an authoritarian environment, I was brainwashed to value patriotism above freedom. * No one ever proved the existence of Zeus, Venus, or Mars. And yet, Greeks believed in them. Which may suggest that a god doesn't have to exist in order to be worshiped. * Albert Einstein: “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.” I wonder how many religious propagandists quote this line minus the last word. * I don't think God and Allah are one and the same Being. The same word, maybe. The same Being, no! I think God is God, and Allah only a pretender to the throne. That's how deep childhood indoctrination goes. * If you are disposed to believe in something, you will believe it regardless of the quality of the evidence. The words “I believe” are invariably followed by an assertion based on hearsay. * It is to be noted that in our context, when I speak of freedom, I don't just mean such unheard of and un-Armenian luxuries as free speech, but the freedom to work and provide for one's family. * If you were to ask a faithful card-carrying member of the Party, he will tell you we enjoy free speech and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. One such specimen once said to me: “I contribute articles for our Weekly and so far none of them has been rejected or edited.” And it is this type of fool who asserts Armenians are smart. # Tuesday, December 9, 2008 **************************************** DEBUNKING AN ARMENIAN MYTH ************************************************** When Lincoln said, “You can't fool all the people all the time,” he should have added, like all rules, this one too has its exceptions. Consider the case of the Armenians who were successfully fooled for 600 years by the Turks. * In the Ottoman Empire we were told, if you are loyal to the Sultan, and by loyal we mean, if you let us fornicate with your most beautiful daughters and brainwash your healthiest and strongest sons to fight in our wars, and if your best and brightest talents serve the Empire with their Allah-given gifts, we will take good care of you. And they kept their word. They took good care of us all right, but only in the way in which American gangsters use that expression. * The idea that we are smart is so deeply ingrained in us that I have met Armenians who don't even qualify as inbred morons but who think of themselves as great intellects, men of vision, and defenders of the faith. Figure that one out if you can. * We like to say Turks are dumb, and we forget that they ran a mighty empire for 600 years and we can't even run a small community without creating a thousand and one irreconcilable differences and internecine conflicts. How smart is that? * Gulbenkian was smart. That's why he left most of his fortune to the Portuguese. Now that's what I call being really smart. * Consider what's happening in our discussion forums today. Calling them forums is a misnomer. They are either clubs of mutual admiration or cesspools of verbal abuse. * I am told I am consistently negative. Do you know what does being positive really mean in our context? It means to blind oneself in one eye in order not to see that which may not be flattering to our collective vanity. And whenever one of us refuses to mutilate himself in order to adopt that mode of observation, we label him a defeatist, a pessimist, an enemy, a Turk in disguise. Result? Honesty is out, charlatanism is in. * “Yes im anoush Hayastani.” He wrote that when he was young, brainwashed and very probably drunk. “Yes im aboosh hayrenagitsneri.” Very probably his last unspoken words as he was banging his head against the wall of his cell in a Yerevan jail. Now, let us pray. # Wednesday, December 10, 2008 **************************************** REFLECTIONS ************************************************** Some day Armenians and Turks may break bread together. But Armenians and Armenians?... * If we blame others for all our misfortunes, we must then ask ourselves: What has been our contributions to our history? If nothing, what right do we have to complain? If something, what exactly? * My critics hate my honesty more than I hate their dishonesty. * Damaged egos are the biggest. * Armenians read me for two reasons: (one) I write about them; and (two) to be ignored is the greatest insult. * In a world where underdogs believe they shall inherit the earth and top dogs are convinced their position of eminence is a blessing from God, we will have self-satisfied cowards and guiltless bloodsuckers. * Explaining things to someone who has no desire to understand is like trying to reason with the unreasonable. * After they silence dissenters, brainwash children, and surround themselves with yes-men, tyrants assume God and the silent majority to be on their side. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted December 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted December 17, 2008 Sunday, December 14, 2008 **************************************** SUMMING UP (II) ************************************************** Free speech is a fundamental human right not only for men who know and understand everything and are therefore seldom or never wrong, but also for poor mortals whose knowledge and understanding are limited and whose opinions are more often than not more wrong than right. * A man with a heavy burden of guilt is safer to deal with than a man who is innocent by reason of insanity or absence of conscience. * A Turk who can tell right from wrong is morally superior to an Armenian who violates someone's human right in the name of patriotism. * To say, because I know better and am therefore better qualified to silence you, is at the root of all massacres. To put it differently: All crimes against humanity begin with the violation of a single individual's human rights. * I have yet to meet a patriotic Armenian with more certainties than doubts who did not harbor fascist sentiments. * The brainless are more easily brainwashed to believe, even when they behave like swine, they are fully qualified to assert moral superiority. * To those who say I have been silenced because I am an irrelevant mediocrity of no interest to the general reader, I say: Not all of us are endowed with superior intellects or able to discriminate what is and is not relevant. * Nothing comes easier to a self-assessed genius than to look down on his fellow men as misguided fools in need of his political, intellectual, and moral guidance. * Like all nations we too have our share of misguided fools and criminal minds who operate on the assumption they are leaders of men. # Monday, December 15, 2008 **************************************** THE POSITIVE IN THE NEGATIVE ************************************************** Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” * At the turn of the last century, the Great Powers of the West were on our side and against our enemies. But no one ever bothered to ask them if they would be willing to sacrifice the life of a single soldier to save a hundred, a thousand, or even a million Armenian lives. Had they asked, they wold have been surprised at the answer. * It is not true that I receive only hostile or negative assessments of my work. To be fair to my readers, I also receive friendly or positive ones. Two reasons why I don't mention them is that (one) I may provoke my enemies to accuse me of self-promotion, and (two) I may make my friendly readers vulnerable to verbal abuse. * Saroyan was a “positive” write because he wrote for an American audience. If I write like Scrooge it may be because I write for an Armenian audience. Different strokes for different folks. On the positive side: in America we enjoy not only freedom of speech but also freedom of choice when it comes to reading matter. If you are the kind of reader who is big on positive stuff, by all means, feel free to bury your head in the sand until the next catastrophe, which, if lucky, you may not live long enough to experience or witness. * Some of our most brilliant humorists (Baronian, Odian, Massikian) were also the most negative. * My negative readers are positive in the sense that they are my main source of inspiration. Without them I would dry up and wither away. * There are visible catastrophes, and there are invisible ones, as when you witness the collapse of your belief system. * When a reader insults me, I know I have hit paydirt; and I would like to thank him for letting me stay in his consciousness rent-free. # Tuesday, December 16, 2008 **************************************** OF CABBAGES AND KINGS ************************************************** After gloating over the collapse of Communism, Americans are now witnessing the collapse of Capitalism and the triumph of the Welfare State not only for the poor but also for the rich; and when the rich apply for welfare, they speak in billions; and unless they get their way, they threaten the collapse of the economic structure. Capitalists don't beg; they blackmail. * Instead of speaking of cabbages and kings, let's speak of truth and lies; and if truth is beyond our reach, let's expose liars. * It is in failure that the lies of an ideology are exposed. * If you live by the sword, or if you use nationalism or patriotism as a sword, the writing on the wall will be the same. * In a commentary today I read that President Bush has supported and invited to the White House dissidents from “China, Burma, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela.” Are you thinking what I am thinking? * George Will in ONE MAN'S AMERICA (New York, Random House, 2008): “The use of genocide as a plaything for political posturing is contemptible” (page 197). I urge all our Turcocentric ghazetajis, dime-a-dozen self-appointed pundits, and baloney artists to think of this line next time they use the word genocide. Further down George Will speaks of the “trivialization of a huge tragedy” that has become “fodder for semi-intellectual wisecracks...” and, I would add, an occasion for self-righteous riffraff to assert moral superiority. Elsewhere he speaks of “the beguiling simplicity of pure stupidity.” * Where mediocrities enter, men of vision are blinded. # Wednesday, December 17, 2008 **************************************** WORDS ************************************************** Rudyard Kipling: “Words are, of course, the post powerful drugs used by mankind.” * The defeated and deported Azeri who lives in a tent or ghetto is my brother. He is as guilty as the overwhelming majority of Armenians at the turn of the last century in the Ottoman Empire – Armenians like my mother (who was a baby) and father (not yet a teenager) who had no political ambitions or, for that matter, awareness. Next time you speak of war, think of the children. * There is Russian roulette, and there is Armenian roulette. In Armenian roulette there are no empty chambers. * If you insult me and I insult you back, who wins? * By writing I hope to change the world. I know this to be an illusion on my part but I go on writing. Notwithstanding the fact that so far I have failed to change the mind of a single fanatic, hoodlum, partisan or fascist, I go on writing in the hope that some day I may hit on the right combination of words and ideas that may connect. I know this to be another illusion but I go on writing in the hope that the invisible forces of history and the universe will combine to create the kind of fertile soil in which ideas may germinate into action. If this is another illusion, so be it! # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted December 20, 2008 Author Report Share Posted December 20, 2008 Thursday, December 18, 2008 **************************************** WORDS (II) ************************************************** A man once went up to a French writer (may have been Valéry) and said: “I have a great idea for a book.” The writer interrupted him by saying, “Books are written with words, not ideas.” * Marx had all the ideas, but Casanova knew the right words. * You want to know why I write one-liners? To write a book, one must first learn to write a good line. Only then one may learn to write two lines.... * When Moliere's “bourgeois gentilhomme” delivers the celebrated line, “You mean to tell me I spoke prose all my life and didn't know it?” Moliere's teacher could have replied: “Just because you speak prose, it doesn't mean you can also write it.” * It is easy to have all the answers if you ask the wrong questions. * In his recently published biography of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick French quotes him as having said: “I am enraged by the way Indians don't wish to understand their history, I am enraged.” Naipaul's book on India is titled A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION. The first Armenian novel in ashkharapar or the spoken idiom is by Khachatur Abovian (1805-1848) and it's titled THE WOUNDS OF ARMENIA. And to think that Abovian wrote his novel nearly a century before the real wound. * The worst thing that can happen to a wounded nation is to be obsessed with its wound, * A nation with a wounded soul will have a traumatized understanding and view anyone who says otherwise as an enemy of the nation. * What is Naipaul's rage to India? What is an ant's rage to an elephant? # Friday, December 19, 2008 **************************************** TWO WRITERS ************************************************** Adrienne Rich: “Lying is done with words and also silence.” * In his “Reply to historians who are against senators voting for legislation against anti-Armenian denialists” (LE POINT, November 27, 2008), the French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy, writes that these historians expect us to believe that such a law, if passed, would terrorize historians' freedom of expression. “Who's kidding whom?” he writes. “It is not anti-denialist laws that terrorize historians, it is denialists who terrorize them.” To the question, “Why the necessity of a French law about a crime in which France is not implicated,” Levy writes: “I am not sure about that. We know for a fact that at least in two instances in 1919, in Marash and Hedjin in Cilicia, when the French army stood by and did nothing to protect the victims.” Where there is a crime against humanity, he goes on, all of mankind is implicated. “We cannot therefore justify ourselves by saying, we are not guilty of a crime, we only allowed others to commit it.” * In his introduction to L'OLOCAUSTO ARMENO (The Armenian Holocaust), Alberto Rosselli informs the reader that the bibliography on the subject is “vastissima” (very vast). In addition to Armenian sources, “which are obviously numerosissimi (very numerous), there are sources in French, American, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, English, and Russian.” In addition there are eyewitness accounts of diplomats from as many countries, including Germany, “at a time when Germany was an ally of the Ottoman Empire.” Among the Turkish sources he mentions Taner Akcam and Orhan Pamuk. He also discusses the recent work of the German historian, Hilmar Kaiser. The book is divided into chapters devoted to the history of Armenia, the Armenian Church, the Hamidian massacres, the regime of the Young Turks, and Armenia today. In addition the reader will find here a chronology of the Ottoman Empire and a bibliography of books in Italian, English, and French. After reading this book, I doubt very much if there will be a single Italian who will doubt the reality of the Genocide and the self-inflicted blindness of denialists. Rosselli is a prolific historian and journalist who has authored books on Canada, the United States, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, Germany, Turkey, and Africa. * Groucho Marx: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.” # Saturday, December 20, 2008 **************************************** A CIVILIZED ARMENIAN ************************************************** Reading Evelyn Waugh's DIARY – over 800 pages of boring gossip and venomous assessments. On Edmund Wilson: “An insignificant Yank.” On President Truman: “A wholly comic man.” On Aldous Huxley: “I find his scientific imagery very flat and ugly.” On Alberto Moravia: “A wop highbrow.” In a December 1944 entry in Yugoslavia, he speaks of an encounter with “a toothless Armenian named Major Karmel...: he is quick-witted, funny, fond of wine and cigars, and with the adaptability of his race quickly dropped his original line-regiment heartiness and became human and civilized...” A month later: “Illiterate Montenegrin Armenian called and was given clothes.” There is more talk of food and booze here than books and literature. And this: “It is impudent and exorbitant to demand truth from the lower classes.” * BERNIE MADOFF *************************** A Jewish friend recently made fun of Armenian monks brawling in a church. Today I sent him the following e-mail: “I'd much rather see monks beating one another to a pulp in a church than a swindler like Bernie Madoff sucking the blood of his fellow Jews – and I am not implying here we don't have our share of mini-Madoffians.” * GUTLESS YES-MEN ********************************* A nation without dissidents is a gutless nation afraid of words and ideas. And those who support such a nation in the name of patriotism are misguided fools who believe ideas and intellectuals are irrelevant luxuries, perhaps even hostile elements. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted December 30, 2008 Author Report Share Posted December 30, 2008 Sunday, December 28, 2008 **************************************** POWER AND KNOWLEDGE ************************************************** Knowledge is power. Those who know mislead, exploit, and oppress the ignorant as surely as the mighty victimize the weak and defenseless. * All my life I wanted to find honest work, and when I finally found one, no one had any use for me. If I persevere, it's because, in Moliere's words: “I prefer a comfortable vice to a tiring virtue.” * The danger of belief systems is not their absurdities but the fact that they find strength in numbers, so that the average man with average intelligence feels justified in asking; “Who am I to contradict millions?” * If you share the same belief system with a fool, brother, look into it. * The language of power: Why try to reason, educate, and convince when you can brainwash, intimidate, and silence those who resist? * We like to be massaged – body, ego, soul – and we are willing to pay for it handsomely to speechifiers, sermonizers, and generally speaking, dealers in verbal crapola. As for writers who make us feel uncomfortable, we love to see them starved. * As for our so-called cunning: it consists mainly in devising strategies to avoid facing reality. # Monday, December 29, 2008 **************************************** READING BETWEEN THE LINES ************************************************** In politics, and life in general, the meaning that resides between the lines often contradicts the meaning in the lines. * Only an unspeakably self-satisfied simpleton with the IQ of a jackass would violate someone's free speech on the grounds that free speech is not a fundamental human right but a privilege bestowed only on those who are infallible, among them himself. * My message: We may not be as good as we think we are. The message of our leadership: We may be better than we think we are. Needless to add, the naïve souls among us cannot see the connection between this shamelessly flattering self-assessment and the unspoken punch line that inevitably and invariably will follow, “mi kich pogh...” * My morning paper informs me today that the prime minister of Turkey called Israeli air strikes in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” He could have said, in war bad things happen to good people. But he didn't. He said “crimes against humanity” -- and so far only 300 dead. I suggest this may well be a new chapter in Turkish foreign policy. * The ambition of every Armenian dunghill is to be Mt. Ararat. * Thomas Mann: "The intellectual man is almost as much interested in painful truths as the fool is in those which flatter him." # Tuesday, December 230, 2008 **************************************** NOTES AND COMMENTS ************************************************** “My grandmother once said to me...” If your grandmother said that, who am I to contradict grandmotherhood, shish-kebab and pilaf? * If you are honest, you expose the dishonest. If you do something well, you drive the incompetent to bankruptcy. * My great failure in the eyes of my Armenian readers is that I write not as an Armenian but as a human being, as if being Armenian and being human were mutually exclusive concepts. * We owe all progress to losers. Winners are only the beneficiaries of the struggle initiated and carried out by losers. Winners only deliver the coup de grace. * If a fool refuses to learn from the wise, he will have to learn from life, and reality can be a harsh teacher. * Whatever wisdom I have I owe it to my folly. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted January 3, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 3, 2009 Wednesday, December 31, 2008 **************************************** MY ANSWER ************************************************** Once in a while a gentle reader takes it upon himself to remind me that what I say doesn't apply to everyone because it is based on self-analysis, and that it is wrong to project my own conflicts and contradictions onto the nation. I have at no time denied the fact that my analysis of our complexes is based on self-analysis. In my formative years and for a good fraction of my adult life I was a typical Armenian with all the prejudices, preconceptions, and fallacies that I now enjoy tearing to shreds. Neither have I ever denied that I was a devout believer of every single lie that was foisted on me by our “betters.” It is only very recently that I became aware of our reality as opposed to the fiction in which I lived. To put it differently: I was taught to be a narcissist, and after many years of slumber in a fool's paradise, I woke up one day with the realization that I was neither smart nor honest. If you tell me what a nation needs to achieve greatness is confidence in its own ability to confront and overcome challenges, and that at this point in our history what we need is not my kind of negativism that demoralizes us and turn us into defeatists like myself; I say, that is your perception of what I do based on your status as a dupe, and that to promote liberation from the lies of our propagandists is far from being negative or defeatist. It is, in point of fact, quintessentially positive and invigorating. I further maintain to be enslaved by comfortable lies is as bad as being enslaved by Turks. But to see this clearly you must first extricate your head from the sand in which you have it buried. # Thursday, January 1, 2009 **************************************** LEARNING FROM GENGHIS KHAN ************************************************** The first words on the back cover of Conn Iggulden's historical novel, GENGHIS: LORDS OF THE BOW, are: “After uniting warring clans...” * Once upon a time all empire were a single clan. Their career as empire began when one clan persuaded another to join forces on the grounds that two clans together are less vulnerable to aggression from other clans. * Clans are bad enough. Warring clans might as well be an open invitation to conquerors. * God did not create more Mongols, Chinese, Russians or Americans. If we are few today it's because some of us saw the writing on the wall and switched loyalties. * Let the fool enjoy his folly so that he may be wise, even if wisdom comes at the hour of his death. * When Indians burned widows, did any one of them ever bother to raise the question: “Why don't we ask the widows if they like to be burned?” Civilizations should be judged by the manner they treat the weak and defenseless. * If you want to understand Armenians, don't read their nationalist historians; read instead a history of Armenian literature. The only reason we don't burn writers the way Indians burn widows is that we prefer to ignore them, which amounts to burying them alive. * Because I refuse to share their obsession with massacres and money, they call me negative. One way to be positive in their eyes is to adopt “Yes, sir!” as a mantra. # Friday, January 2, 2009 **************************************** DIVIDING LINES ************************************************** Speaking of his mother, Edward Gorey says in an interview: “She had a stroke when she was about eighty and her entire character changed. All her hypocritical love for humanity vanished.” (ASCENDING PECULIARITY: EDWARD GOREY ON EDWARD GOREY. Interviews by Karen Wilkin, page 95.) This type of dividing line in one's life happens to all of us; and when readers disagree with me violently, I cannot help thinking that their disagreement has not yet reached the line that divides propaganda from reality. When did I change my mind about my fellow Armenians? In my case it was not so much a line but the last straw that broke the camel's back. * As children we should be taught to reflect that every conviction and dogma in our belief system may well be wrong and there may be more merit in their contradictions. That, it seems to me, should be the underlying principle in all educational systems. * In her review of LEFT IN DARK TIMES by Bernard-Henri Levy, Claire Berlinski mentions a Turkish friend of hers who “like most Turks” has been brought up to believe “the Armenians had it coming.” (NATIONAL REVIEW, December 15, 2008, page 32.) * A true sign of insanity, it has been said, is the belief that everyone else is crazy. In my view, another sure symptom of insanity is the belief that the world is run by intelligent men who place the interests of their people and mankind in general above their own and anyone who says otherwise must be nuts. * In a recent issue of the ARMENIAN REPORTER (December 20), there is a remarkable letter to the editor by Ara Sarafian outlining in some detail the present situation of Armeno-Turkish relations, which clearly implies that when it comes to the Genocide issue, our Turcocentric ghazetajis may be doing more harm than good. I urge Ara Sarafian to post this letter on Armenian discussion forums on the Internet. # Saturday, January 3, 2009 **************************************** ON APOLOGIES ************************************************** As a rule governments don't like apologizing for past crimes but they may change their mind when under pressure from their own people, or so we are told in THE POLITICS OF OFFICIAL APOLOGIES by Melissa Nobles, where we also learn: “The Armenians are not going to get an apology any time soon, in spite of a worldwide public campaign, from the Turkish government for the atrocities committed during World War I because most Turks are not prepared to accept that their government bore responsibility.” * The best interview in THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, volume I (New York, 2006) is the one with Dorothy Parker, a relatively minor writer; the most boring is the one with T.S. Eliot – a pezzo novanta. Unlike Eliot who speaks only about himself and his work, Dorothy Parker speaks of many things and is never long-winded. * Armenians who vilify Turks and Turks who vilify Armenians don't think of themselves as racists because they assume the whole world knows what bloodthirsty savages Turks are and what nasty, disloyal scum Armenians are. But the whole world knows nothing of the kind and cares even less. To most of the world Turks and Armenians might as well be Hutus and Tutsis. As an Armenian, the only thing I know about Hutus and Tutsis is that they are tribes in Africa. The average Canadian doesn't even know where Armenia is. To him we might as well be Romanians or Arameans. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted January 7, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 7, 2009 Sunday, January 4, 2009 **************************************** ON PHONIES ************************************************** There is a tendency in all phonies to see only the phony in others. Face to face with an honest man, they feel ill at ease and their first instinct is to bring him down to their own level. Consider what happened to Zarian, one of the very few authentic giants in our literature. Every mediocrity in both the Homeland and Diaspora accused him of being a KGB or a CIA agent, or even a plagiarist. When Shahnour accused Siamanto of plagiarism, he quoted chapter and verse. When Zarian himself accused Charents of plagiarism, he mentioned Marinetti and Mayakovsky. But as far as I know none of our phonies ever stated whom did Zarian plagiarize. * Once upon a time fascists identified themselves as fascists. Not anymore. Nowadays they speak in the name of nationalism, as if fascism and nationalism were mutually exclusive concepts; and when they silence dissent, they do so as if it were their patriotic duty. * Some of my readers remind me of sharks circling and waiting for traces of blood to appear in the water. * Why do I write as I do? Because no one else does. * If the laws in Dickens's time were applied to American chief executive officers today, a great many of them who now travel in their own private jets would be in jail. It is such a pity that technological progress has become inseparable with moral degeneracy. # Monday, January 5, 2009 **************************************** ON IDEAS ************************************************** Armenians who are obsessed with Turkish criminal conduct are eager to inform me that my ideas lack originality. * The awareness of doing the right thing is better than fame, fortune, and happiness. * If you have only one idea, you have no choice. If you have two ideas, you have a choice. Two is better than one because freedom is better than slavery. * There is a familiar type of Armenian who is cunning enough to know that one way to have the last word is to make himself so repellent that anyone with the minimum sense of hygiene will do his utmost to stay as far away from him as possible. * Annihilating your enemy in the name of victory is the Ottoman way. So is verbally abusing those who disagree with you. * What matters is not how we treat our friends, but how we treat our enemies. * An enemy is one we have failed to convince that it will be to his advantage to be our friend. * To be savaged by fools and fanatics is the surest sign of being on the right path. # Tuesday, January 6, 2009 **************************************** AD HOMINEM ************************************************** Let better men than myself reach for the truth. All I want is avoid being absurd. * History teaches us to recognize blunders when we see them. If history, including our own, continues to be a succession of blunders, it may be because the number of blunders is infinite, the human brain at its most creative in their invention, and self-deception a constant. * Self-deception allows us to be absurd and self-righteous at the same time. * To those who wonder how dare I speak in the name of the nation when no one elected me, my answer is: I speak only as a human being and I don't need majority support to think, feel, and reason as a human being. * A typical Armenian is an open wound and a closed mind. * Anonymous: "A genius has his limitations. A fool does not." * Voicing morally superior sentiments is not the same as being morally superior. If it were, every sermonizer would be a saint. * Commissars of culture and culture are mutually exclusive concepts. # Wednesday, January 7, 2009 **************************************** PARALLEL LINES ************************************************** It is safe to assume that not all chief executive officers in America are crooks. But when the honest ones saw the writing on the wall, spoke up and said, “We can no longer afford private jets, million-dollar salaries, big bonuses, and golden parachutes,” they were silence by the crooks who said, “Relax! We are too big to fail. Uncle Sam will bail us out.” And Uncle did because the easiest thing in the world is to be generous with someone else's money. (I have already read a pundit who called Obama “an empty suit.") * Something similar happened to our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire when they were warned they were no better than frogs trying to rape an elephant. To which our revolutionaries replied: “Relax! We are not in this alone. The great powers of the West are on our side. The Turks wouldn't dare!” But the Turks dared because they knew the great powers were not our Uncle Sam and wouldn't spill a single drop of blood to save us. * And speaking of blood: We have shed our blood and we have done so copiously in defense of alien and even hostile empires, among them the Byzantine, the Ottoman, and the Soviet (350,000 dead during World War II alone). If we judge a tree by its fruit, a man by his actions, and a nation's IQ by its history, we may have to conclude that we are not the sharpest knife in the drawer. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted January 10, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 10, 2009 Thursday, January 8, 2009 **************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ************************************************** A Muslim scholar in Canada has written a book critical of Islam and now lives in fear of assassination. * It is only natural for those who are part of the problem to pretend not to see the solution. * Before you attain greatness you must achieve honesty, and of the two, achieving honesty may well be the more demanding enterprise. * Once upon a time, in the Middle Ages, we were celebrated for being good fighters. We still are, but only against the wrong enemy: ourselves. * More often than not, it is in our efforts to appear smart that we expose ourselves as fools. * It makes little sense to support one side against another when both belong to the dustbin of history. * In all political movements, lust for power is invariably hidden behind noble slogans; the greater the lust, the nobler the slogans. # Friday, January 9, 2009 **************************************** OBSERVATIONS ************************************************** To know nothing is better than to know only one side of the story. * Writing history should be more akin to examining our conscience as opposed to emphasizing the positive and covering up the negative. * It is not enough for an Armenian to win an argument, he must also annihilate his adversary. * After three decades of hard work I am now in a position to state with some degree of certainty and pride that I have made more enemies than friends. * Like most men, computers must be programmed in order to think. * It makes little sense keeping up with the Joneses if the Joneses are busy keeping up with the Smiths. * When top dogs don't trust one another, underdogs quarrel among themselves. * You work hard all your life, you make a fortune, you share your fortune with ingrates who insult you: who says benefactors are better off than scribblers? # Saturday, January 10, 2009 **************************************** REFLECTIONS ************************************************** The most visible feature of a nation is not its Golden Age or its celebrities, but its degree of solidarity. No one takes seriously a nation that has been manipulated by the divide-and-rule tactics of other nations for most of its existence. * To alienate a fraction of the people is to amputate the nation. * When I said the greatest insult to a writer is to ignore him, they stopped insulting me. If only I could solve all my problems with the same ease. * “The buck stops here”: the four most un-Armenian words in the English language. * Do I write because I like to annoy the hell out of dupes, bigots and charlatans? Why not? Isn’t that as good a reason as any? * It is not at all unusual for our chauvinists to preach Armenian culture and to practice Ottoman barbarism. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted January 13, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 13, 2009 Sunday, January 11, 2009 **************************************** MEGALOMANIA ************************************************** Our public library (kpl.org) has acquired a new paperback edition of MEIN KAMPF. They have discarded some of my favorite books – among them Tolstoy's HADJI MURAD, Lesley Blanch's SABRES OF PARADISE, Klaus Mann's autobiography, and Joachim Maass's THE GOUFFE CASE – but retained Hitler, and they say crime doesn't pay. * In my teens and early twenties when I wanted to read everything from A to Z, I also gave Hitler's KAMPF and Marx's KAPITAL a try, but I no longer remember if I finished them. It is easy to start reading a book but difficult finishing them. Of the dozen or so books that I borrow from the library every week I may or may not finish reading one or at most two. Like Sartre (“I'd much rather read a crime novel than Wittgenstein”) I'd rather read an entertaining second-rater than a ponderous big shot who takes himself seriously and expects to be taken seriously. * Taking oneself seriously: that's another one of our maladies. A reader once said to me, “Maybe the writers you quote (from Khorenatsi to Zarian) failed because they went about it the wrong way.” There is no limit to our megalomania – from the turn-of-the-century revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire (“frogs trying to rape and elephant”) to Turcocentric ghazetajis today parading as defenders of the faith and saviors of the nation. Which is one reason why I hesitate to identify myself as a critic or a dissident or even a writer. I feel more comfortable calling myself a "sh** disturber.” # Monday, January 12, 2009 **************************************** ON PROGRESS ************************************************** We are a nation of small potatoes ruled by cabbages who pretend to be kings. * My morning paper informs me that, according to a watchdog agency, “democracy declined significantly in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova.” * We like to think of ourselves as progressive, but the truth is progress has never been our most important product. At the turn of the last century our political parties were run by intellectuals. Today they are run by businessmen, that is to say, by bottom-feeders whose greatest concern is the bottom line. If that's progress, it's more like the progress of a disease. In whatever we have done, we have followed our masters, be they Turks or Russian – not the two brightest stars in the firmament of democratic rule and progress. * I write as I do because I don't care for the sound of my own voice. I was brought up to be a narcissist. I now see more merit in self-loathing. * If I were a success, I wouldn't write as I do because I would do my utmost not to bite the hand that lays the golden egg. * Where a part-time janitor makes more money than a full-time writer, there will be an abundance of recycled crap and a total absence of ideas. * It is extremely difficult for me to be civil to individuals who in a different time and place would have been my executioners. # Tuesday, January 13, 2009 **************************************** LET FREEDOM RING ************************************************** Freedom means participation in power. Freedom means telling our fund-raisers: We demand accountability and certification from an independent forensic accountant. Freedom means to treat our political leaders not as masters but as public servants. Freedom means saying “No!” to our bosses, bishops, benefactors, and their assorted hirelings, flunkeys, and brown-nosers without fear of retaliation. Freedom means lessons in civics in our schools, so that our children will grow up learning not only about Turkish atrocities but also about the meaning of democracy and the articles of our constitution. Freedom means saying to our political bosses: Unless you engage in dialogue and develop a consensus we will not support you. Freedom means saying to our bishops: Unless you stop building new churches when old ones remain unattended, we will walk out on your sermons. Freedom means saying to our benefactors: As long as you sink your money into partisan enterprises, thus reinforcing our divisions, we will call you a dupe of charlatans and bloodsuckers and have a good laugh whenever your name is mentioned. Freedom means telling our Turcocentric academics and ghazetajis: Enough is enough! We have had our share of lamentation for our victims and hatred of the perpetrators. Enough massacre editorials, articles, memoirs, monuments, demonstrations, and museums. It is now time that we move on and solve our present problems, among them two “white” genocides – that is, assimilation in the Diaspora and emigration in the Homeland. Have we ever known this kind of freedom throughout our millennial history? The freedom to say “Yes, sir!” is not freedom but subservience, which is another form of slavery. To exchange one form of subservience (be it Ottoman or Soviet) with another is not freedom but a swindle. Wake up, Armenians. You have nothing to lose but your chains! # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted January 17, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 17, 2009 Wednesday, January 14, 2009 **************************************** BEING ARMENIAN ************************************************** “What's wrong with assimilation?” an assimilated Armenian once asked me, and I could not give him an answer. * In everything I say I speak not as an Armenian but as a human being who has done his utmost to go beyond political, racial, national, or tribal labels. * “You repeat yourself,” a Turcocentric ghazetaji who publishes a weekly anti-Turkish tirade once informed me. And when I said, “How many different ways are there of saying Turks are guilty of genocide?” he insulted me. * An Armenian who gets involved in Armenian affairs acquires two sets of unsettled scores: (one) against Turks, (two) against fellow Armenians who disagree with him. * Armenians use insults like voodoo pins – for long-distance murder. * A friend (may he rest in peace) once delivered the following dictum: “The only way to survive in this world is by adopting a form of insanity.” And I can't help thinking that the words of a dead man have a finality that the living cannot match. * The fate of the book hangs on the first paragraph, the same way that “the fate of the house depends on the wedding night” (Balzac). * Q: “Should I write every day or only when I am inspired?” A: “If you have something to say, every day; otherwise, once or twice a year should be sufficient.” # Thursday, January 15, 2009 **************************************** GETTING AT THE SOURCE ************************************************** The closer you get at the truth, the more enemies you make. * It is in disagreement that an Armenian exposes his true nature. * An intellectual's first enemies are not politicians but pseudo-intellectuals who rise not in defense of god and country but grub and ego. Their role model is neither Abovian nor Zarian but Talaat and Stalin. Their unstated aim is the extermination of the intellectual class. Verbal abuse comes more easily to them then a simple assertion of disagreement. * Sooner or later we must all come to terms with the fact that we belong to a nation that has been victimized not only by foreign but also by domestic enemies, and of the two, the domestic have been more dedicated and persistent. * The hardest thing for an Armenian to admit is that the enemy may not always be the other but himself. Only when we are willing to admit this, may we begin to understand the source of our tribalism and divisiveness. * To those who think I have no right to speak for them, only for myself, allow me to reiterate that I have at no time denied the fact that my analysis of the Armenian psyche is rooted in self-analysis. It is this realization that has saved me from applying for membership in one of our mafias. I have at no time felt the need to join a criminal organization to be a perpetrator. * The miracle is not that we have survived, but that there are still more or less smart and decent human beings willing to identity themselves as Armenian even when they are half-Greek, half-Russian, or half-Jewish. # Friday, January 16, 2009 **************************************** WHAT IS LITERATURE? ************************************************** In his WRITING IN THE DARK: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS (New York, 2008), David Grossman says, what made him decide to be a writer was the urge to invent stories. I thought of Scheherazade who invented stories in order to postpone her death. One could say that we too, like Scheherazade, write to postpone the death of the nation. But unlike Scheherazade, we don't write to entertain our masters but to expose the lies of their propaganda. This may explain why Scheherazade succeeded in realizing her goal and we have failed. Fascists in Italy, Nazis in Germany, and Bolsheviks in the USSR lied to the people too and they were exposed not by writers (who tried very hard but failed) but by the reality principle. Italy and Germany lost a war and the USSR went bankrupt. How to explain the fact that our lies have had a much longer lifespan? We were a nation1500 years ago and we like to believe we still are. But are we? In the 20th century alone we experienced three genocides, one “red” (in the Ottoman Empire) and two “white” (assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus in the Homeland). We have become a beggar among nations and at the mercy of – in the words of Avedik Issahakian (not exactly a critic or dissident) -- “earthquakes, bloodthirsty neighbors, and brainless leaders.” You may now guess which of these three “curses” (Issahakian's word) have been emphasized by our “brainless leaders” and their propagandists. For every writer that mentions “brainless leaders,” we have dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of academics, historians, ghazetajis, speechifiers, and sermonizers who do their utmost to cover up the corruption, incompetence, and divisiveness of our leaders and to emphasize our “bloodthirsty neighbors and earthquakes.” And here is where intellectuals come in – to uncover that which is hidden from us. I repeat myself? And what do you think our propagandists do? Another question: Has anyone ever complained that our propagandists, ghazetajis, speechifiers, and sermonizers repeat themselves? And what about our panchoonies? How many different ways are there of saying, “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek.” To those who say, notwithstanding our prophets of doom and gloom, we have endured and we shall continue to endure, I ask: What if most of us, especially the best and the brightest, did not endure and will not endure? # Saturday, January 17, 2009 **************************************** DIARY ************************************************** A Palestinian mother in Gaza: “My children can no longer play in the street.” A suggestion: Why don't they take their damn war somewhere like Sahara or the Gobi desert? * Memo to myself: “Depressing thoughts are carcinogenic agents. You think too much about Armenians.” * My dissenting views are so extreme, it seems, that even our dissenters disagree with me. * If our past were a poem, it would be a lamentation to some, and a triumphal march to others. * When a reader insults me, I think, at least he has read and reflected on what I have written, and that's good enough for me. Beggars can't be choosers. * It is widely known among citizens of a democracy that politics is the second oldest profession and that in many ways it resembles the first. Fascists agree but they think this does not apply to them. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted January 21, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 21, 2009 Sunday, January 18, 2009 **************************************** AGAINST DOGMATISM ************************************************** A doctor in Australia speaking of people in isolated villages: “You must always have a translator with you because when they don't understand a question, they say yes.” It is the same with underdogs everywhere. They think it is safer to say “yes, sir!” even when they are told to drop their pants and bend over. We said yes to Christianity; we said yes to atheism under the Soviets; and in the Ottoman Empire some of us said yes to Islam. We said yes to capitalism in the Diaspora and yes to communism in the Homeland. And today we say yes to our bosses, bishops, benefactors, and their assorted gangs of neo-commissars and "mi kich pogh" panchoonies. * A famous Armenian soprano speaking of a Gomidas love song during a radio interview: “Armenians are shy.” “You mean coy.” “No, shy.” “You are not shy!” We like to think, since most odars, not to say Armenians, are ignorant, we can say anything we want about Armenians and get away with it; and it comes as a shock when we are contradicted. * “To know is to remember,” Socrates used to say. It follows, to remind is to teach. * No matter what you say, there will be those who disagree with you. Remember, there are still flat-earth theorists and dupes who think Hitler and Stalin were messianic figures. * There are honest disagreements and there are Armenian disagreements. If throughout our millennial history consensus has been with us an unattainable Utopian goal, it’s because our disagreements are seldom honest disagreements. * Honest men with honest disagreements may agree to disagree and thus develop a consensus -- which means working together, as opposed to thinking alike. # Monday, January 19, 2009 **************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ************************************************** “I don't like making enemies,” a writer tells me. And I cannot help thinking that the only way to avoid making enemies in our environment is by joining them, if only with your silence. * When I was young I trusted and respected my elders. But with old age comes mistrust and suspicion. So much so that whenever I run into an honest man these days I feel like a born-again human being. * Gone are the good old days when a commissar could permanently silence a dissident with a memo or a phone call with three monosyllables: “Shut him up!” Their only weapon now is verbal abuse. But the trouble with insults is that there are only a limited number of them and only a limited number of times they can be repeated. It has happened to me more than once that after repeatedly and almost daily abusing me for a year or two or even more, they have given up and fallen silent. * Obama's greatest achievement so far is that he survived the insults of his adversaries and is now willing to have them as advisers, and this not in the name of a belief system but common sense. * I am not surprised to read the following headline in one of our weeklies: THOSE WHO WERE NOT AFRAID OF SOVIET INJUSTICE ARE NOW AFRAID OF ARMENIAN JUSTICE. * When an Armenian asks you a question, you can be sure of one thing: he knows the answer. # Tuesday, January 20, 2009 **************************************** ENEMIES ************************************************** Emile Littré : “Man is a most unstable compound, and earth a decidedly inferior planet.” * When it comes to religion and politics, the prevalent attitude among leaders towards the masses is: the less they know and understand the better – because then they can be more easily manipulated and misled. As a result, we know more about the dark side of our enemies than they do; and we know less about ourselves than we should. It follows, anyone who dares to say all men are more or less the same, or Turks are our if not brothers than half-brothers is promptly labeled a traitor. * Our enemy, our real enemy, is not the Turk but knowledge, understanding, and objective judgment. Socrates was guilty of exposing the ignorance of his “betters.” Galileo knew something that the scriptures did not. Solzhenitsyn did not think the men in the Kremlin were morally or intellectually superior, he was therefore guilty of objective judgment. As for writers like Zabel Yessayan, Charents, and Bakounts, among others: they were too smart to be taken in by Bolshevik propaganda – though smart in this context does not mean a higher IQ but the ability to use one's common sense and to think for oneself. * Napoleon once said, “A man with ideas is my enemy.” Which may suggest that rulers prefer to rule over the brainless. In their eyes, to expose the lies of their propaganda might as well be a crime against humanity. * The Turks have a saying: “Chok ghareshterma, bokhou chekar.” Freely translated: “Don't get involved (or mix it up too much), you may expose the sh**.” * Those who have dared to confront tyrants have always been a tiny minority, and tiny enough to be almost invisible to the naked eye. # Wednesday, January 21, 2009 **************************************** HISTORY ************************************************** We have advanced from one form of oppression to another accompanied by long-winded sermons and speeches in the name of God and Country. Who speaks in the name of the people? Who dares to see a cause-and-effect connection between our corruption, incompetence, divisiveness or lack of vision and our status as perennial victims? All we contribute to our narrative is lies. Consider our press: most of it is about Turkish criminal conduct and our minor celebrities. Our problems – from massacres to earthquakes – fall on us without warning like thieves in the night. “Mart bidi ch'ellank.” * We like to think, since we are not guilty of genocide, we are not fascists. But to silence dissent or to be deaf to dissenting voices is if not fascism than it is saying yes to fascism. * There is an idiot in all of us, including the most wise. Likewise, there is a killer in all of us, compliments of our crocodilian ancestors. This may explain why sometimes intelligent men are deceived by fools, and decent men are misled by criminal psychopaths; and here, I could make a long list of famous men who supported Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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